It's hard to talk to noobs about what's going on; I can't believe ABC thinks it's a disappointment that "only" 20 million people showed up for the midseason premiere. If you ask me, 20 million people following either the mythology or the pretty people in jeopardy or both is a pretty good-sized audience on Year Five of a show that one of the main characters has summarized the up-to-now as: "Okay. See, we did crash, but it was on this crazy island. And we waited for rescue, and there wasn't any rescue. And there was a smoke monster, and then there were other people on the island. We called them the Others, and they started attacking us. And we found some hatches, and there was a button you had to push every 108 minutes or... well, I was never really clear on that. But... the Others didn't have anything to do with the hatches. That was the DHARMA Initiative. The Others killed them, and now they're trying to kill us. And then we teamed up with the Others because some worse people were coming on a freighter. Desmond's girlfriend's father sent them to kill us. So we stole their helicopter and we flew it to their freighter, but it blew up. And we couldn't go back to the island because it disappeared, so then we crashed into the ocean, and we floated there for a while until a boat came and picked us up. And by then, there were six of us. That part was true. But the re... But the rest of the people... who were on the plane? They're still on that island."

I'm telling you, if you just tuned in to catch a glimpse of that Wolverine-looking guy traipsing around with his shirt off, that little precis isn't gonna make any sense to you whatsoever. But for those of us watching our DVDs like Oliver Stone with his pause button the Zapruder film, ol' Hurley was right on. Honestly, he summarized his last four years more cogently than I could do mine.

Anyway, surely you've heard of the cosmic reset theory? How this whole thing is happening to get 815 safely to Los Angeles? And how the opening-on-the-eye motif signals a cosmic reset? The String Theory, too? How Faraday says time is a stream that you can move along? I think this explains things like Charlie's magical re- and dis- appearing sleeves on a shirt he swapped back and forth all the time:

and things like the regular Dharma logo:

and Ben's Orchid logo trigrams all being swapped around:

...seem to prove not that there's in attention being paid in the prop department, but extreme attention to detail otherwise ignored.

I don't know which world we're going to end up with, but I do know the LOST team is crafting a very rich entertainment for us. I can't believe they make one of these every eight days.