Unraveling the Mysteries of "Lost"

A key example of how they were about to step things up came that same month, in an episode entitled "The Man Behind the Curtain," when the enigmatic leader of the island's original inhabitants, Benjamin Linus, introduced Locke to Jacob — the man who holds all the island's secrets yet remains invisible to almost everybody. ( Read Rolling Stone's Q&A with Michael Emerson, who plays Linus.) Unlike anything earlier in Lost, this spooky moment went beyond any naturalistic explanation. It was also a sign that, years into its life, Lost still dares to defy any easy meanings; that is, it's not afraid to give up its mysteries both slowly and suddenly, according to the creators' own designs and agenda. "We always had a plan that the sort of genre elements of the show would become more overt over time," says Cuse. "There's a sense of weirdness that existed right from the beginning of the series — a mysterious monster in the jungle, plus a polar bear on an island. We always felt we were interjecting elements that suggested that this was not a normal, real, scientifically grounded place. As you move downstream, the natural progression is for those sorts of elements to become more overt. It was just a question of when they could be revealed."

Cuse and Lindelof have said that, with the fourth and fifth seasons, they've reached a point in which the show is now answering more questions that it is raising. It doesn't always feel that way, though — in fact, anything solved only leads to more mystified territory. In recent episodes, not only have many of the events been out of proper time order, but time itself has been out of time order. The hoped-for rescue at the end of the third season turned out instead to be a killing party, meant to seize the island. In order to save it and everyone on it, Benjamin Linus (easily the most riveting and disturbing character on television in years) pulled off the wondrous coup of moving the island, hiding it almost wholly from detection. But that salvage came at a devastating cost: The effort unhinged the island not only in place but in time, and the remaining crash survivors (and a few other interlopers) found themselves hurling abruptly and painfully from one year or season to another, even to different eons that might include the future (and certainly include the ancient past), until some end up stuck in the year 1977, and others seemingly in 2007. Worse, this principal band of survivors, who were once compatriots, may now find themselves at deadly cross-purposes: The powers between them are now inverted, and their belief systems have swapped out. Even death's perpetuity has come undone — at least for some. (Benjamin Linus murdered John Locke in Los Angeles, for no seeming reason, yet now, back on the island, Locke is yet alive when Ben next meets him).

"The storytelling is now marrying the mysteries of the characters and the island," says Lindelof. "Why are these people intertwined with the island? Why them? I think the audience has always gotten a sense that Oceanic 815 did crash for a reason, and those people on that plane were brought to the island to do something. The audience has been buying that — they want to feel that this crash wasn't arbitrary. This is the shift we're moving into."