Frankly, I'm embarrassed for adults I hear saying things like, "Ohhh, I never miss Dancing With the Stars, or American Idol, or Project Runway, or Pick a Skank (or whatever's the name of that thing with Bret Michaels). All I can think is, "Good lord, is life really that empty and desperate? Never miss? Do you have all your tax files in order? Are all the screws in the garage separated by size, labeled, and put away? Tires full? Walked the dog? Already sent a birthday card to Mom?"

But now that I'm hopelessly fascinated with Lost, I've lost some of the edge on my high-and-mighty righteousness. I haven't made much of my obsession here because, well, because there are approximately 100 Lost fan sites on the web deconstructing every episode and trading theories about what in the hell is going on. Who needs me?

I bring it up now only because last night's episode, titled, "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham", was particularly good, with several rudder-yanking twists, one terrific movie-quality action sequence (the shooting of Matthew Abaddon and Locke's car crash), and an accelerating plunge into the roiling waters of "what might be."

(The heretofore uber villain of the piece, Charles Widmore, not only reveals a plausibly compassionate, rational side to Jeremy Bentham/John Locke . . . whom you see was dead in last season's cliffhanger but is alive again at the beginning of this episode [by virtue of being on the plane that crossed through the island's time-travel vortex] but then was strangled to death later on last night in a flashback to a moment in the future from when he left the island but really was only four days in his time . . . oh, never mind.)

I was a fan of The X-Files through the first five or six seasons of its run (Who remembers the episode—"Home"—about the mutant hillbilly brothers and mom whom they kept under the bed? Good stuff . . . . ) but lost interest when it became obvious Chris Carter and his writing team had no idea where they were with their Grand Unifying Government Alien Conspiracy Theory.

Lost spent a season rattling and wobbling on its tracks. This often happens when a show achieves hit status. The creators look at each other and say, "Holy sh*t, if they're not going to cancel us, I guess that means we actually have to make sense of all this." You always know you're in deep filler zone with these shows when they burn up lots of valuable air minutes and episodes with silly "relationship" subplots: Does Kate love Sawyer? Does Kate love Jack? Who really cares?

Lost, of course, has a deal that takes it through an actual conclusion in May of 2010, or twenty-five more episodes, if I'm counting correctly.

My pals who are hooked currently on their DVD sets of The Wire and still quote lines from Paulie Walnuts give me the same look I give the America's Biggest Loser drones . . . . "Sad, silly little man. Still checking in with your Deep Space Nine chat room?"

They have no patience for all the too-clever-by-half, post-grad literary references sprinkled through Lost, and their eyes roll when you start blathering about the concept of sacrifice with all its religious connotations and how Charles Widmore and the much more conspicuously villainous Benjamin Linus can be thought of as good and evil, God and demon, only alternating currents from episode to episode.

Lost is pop culture with ambitions. It has the feel of being produced by people who watched hundreds of cornball cop and doctor shows, most shot on the cheap within twenty miles of Burbank, and who said, "Let's go for something big here, a classic even." It is mass entertainment for a demanding audience that savors puzzles but whose critical antennae are highly attune to "forward progress."
 
Last night, Widmore, the sinister billionaire, came to Locke's rescue after Locke turned the wheel controlling (to some extent) the island's temporal positioning, and he, like Ben before him, fell through a portal into the Tunisian desert. Later, Ben interrupted Locke's suicide . . . only to strangle him himself a couple minutes later, in response to either Locke recommending a woman in Los Angeles (in last week's episode) or revealing that Jin, the Korean husband, is still alive . . . I'm not sure which. But every Lostie has good reason to suspect that Ben knows Locke had to "sacrifice" himself as he was told he would and will live again once he's loaded into the coffin and flown through the time warp.

This would all be exceedingly silly if the show wasn't terrifically well-produced, with all that location shooting out in Hawaii and elsewhere. The pilot episode--where the original plane crashed--was budgeted at a reported $10 million, and the series continues to be one of the most expensive-per-episode left on network TV, which, like your average daily newspaper, is all about "consumer" junk like America's Biggest Loser because it is cheap to produce. On such a landscape, Lost has sweep and scale to match a matrix of plots that feel coherent even as you throw up your hands in bafflement a couple times an episode.

But like I say . . . all I get are patronizing looks. "Maybe what you need is more rest. Time away. A support group might help."

There may never have been a show as impenetrable to new viewers as Lost, especially in its present time-hopping phase. I admit that without the fan websites, I'd have long ago lost track of that eery conversation Ben had with Widmore a season ago, when he managed to slip into Widmore's London mansion and awaken him from a shallow sleep. These two manipulators have been playing their game for a very long time.

Among other curious bits, the current season has introduced a (leaking) hydrogen bomb poised to bore into the earth, repeated (fleeting, visual) references to American nuclear testing in the south Pacific in the mid-fifties. (A big part of the fun of the show--enhanced by HD--is what you see on pages of books that flutter by, on signs in hallways, etc.—about which nothing is said.) The suspicion is that the military was drawn there by the mysterious energy source that is the catalyst for all the action.

With Widmore telling Locke (played by Terry O'Quinn) that "a war is coming," (between whom, the old survivors and the ones who crashed on the plane returning the Oceanic Six? Widmore and Ben? Beelezebub and Yahweh?) my suspension of disbelief is locked down for another fifteen months. That means twenty-five more episodes where I consent to putting up with no character ever saying, "OK, let's just stop for a second and figure out what in [bleep] is going on here."  
 
TV this good is worth people looking at you and thinking, "You sad, pathetic dweeb."