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'Lost' opens new season despite strike

BY VERNE GAY | verne.gay@newsday.com

January 27, 2008

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The call should have come in the dead of night, with the wind blowing and bare branches clawing at the windows.

You wanna see it, said the voice (thickly, perhaps) on the other end of the line?

But let Jon Lachonis - aka DocArtz - pick up his story from here:

"It was cold," blogged the Waterville, Maine-based writer for entertainment Web site UnderGround Online. "I was bored. No date for 'Lost' Season 4 had yet been set, the writers' strike was picking up steam with the first signs that it may impact the length of our midseason stay on 'The Island.'

"For the first time in three years thinking about 'Lost' [was] a laborious and painful experience.

"Then I got 'the call.'"

In the sprawling "Lost" landscape - in which the TV show is merely the highest hill - DocArtz has had a unique role as tour guide. Part online critic, booster and "Lost" scholar, he's helped lead fellow Losties through the curlicue trailways of this landscape via UGO as well as his own Web site (docartz .com), thetailsection.com, and other key "Lost" destinations.

DocArtz is certainly not the only one out there blogging "Lost" - there are probably several million, in fact - but no one else got the scoop he did on that figurative dark and stormy night last month: An offer-you-can't-refuse to look at the first four episodes of the new season. It was a privilege denied everyone else on the planet, including TV critics.

Lachonis got his screening, and afterward wrote of the fourth season, which begins Thursday at 9 p.m. on ABC: "A full tank, pedal to the metal, turbocharged story tearing down a corridor of mythology without segmentation, without red herrings, without capricious delays designed to slow down the momentum. 'Lost' is on a mission here, and its objective is to blow your mind in a way that is distinctly 'Lost.'"

Yeah (wow) and after the review ran, the online community went nuts. "I. Can't. Freakin'. Wait." wrote one fan in a characteristic post.

DocArtz isn't alone in stoking interest for the new season of "Lost." A carefully placed interview with star Matthew Fox in Entertainment Weekly helped, too. "[We're] going to get into questions that the audience is just dying to start finding out about," he promised. Like "what is the island, where is this island, when is this island."

Island happenings heat up

Once lionized, then (almost as quickly) dismissed, "Lost" is hot once again - and stuff like this isn't the only reason why.

Virtually alone among the other major strike-crippled hits of network television, "Lost" is returning with a batch of new shows that will air - without breaks or repeats - through early March. It is (if you will) fresh scripted meat in a supermarket where the only item for sale these days seems to be Ramen noodles.

But last May's two-hour finale ("Though the Looking Glass") also catapulted the show into an entire new realm as well: the future. Characters do get off the island, though despite the best efforts of various spoilers to dig them up, answers to how/where/why/what/when remain (as always) alluring and elusive.

Meanwhile, "Lost" co-producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cruse have said the end-game is now officially afoot - or (to paraphrase Churchill) May's stunning blockbuster was the end of the beginning. Both producers - or "Darlton," to smitten fans - have carefully planned a 48-episode arc that will wrap the ABC classic by 2010.

"Certainly my criticism and the frequent criticism [of others] was that the show did not appear to have a plan [and] that this was becoming the kind of Byzantine thing you did in fifth grade with unicorns," says Sarah Bunting, editor in chief of televisionwithoutpity .com, the TV fan Web site, which moderates many "Lost" forums every day.

"But season three answered enough questions and moved the thing forward enough and teased enough plots that people are excited about season four."

But amid anticipation is anxiety. For Darlton and ABC, the idea was to air 16 fresh episodes each year for the next three years - each part of a nice, taut, intricately assembled arc that completes their tale three years from now.

When the writers' strike began in early November, only a handful were completed, and with eight shows in the can so far, "Lost's" entire 2008 season could be over by early March.