What is Lost about?

No, seriously. Put down the bong and let's have a CONVERSATION for a change. Or at least, let me rap at ya' in a single direction.

Is Lost a show about a bunch of people stranded on a desert island? Is it about these people's pasts, the journeys that brought them to Oceanic Flight 815? Is it about who Kate hearts the most, Jack or Sawyer? Or is it about some grand mysterious conspiracy, the pieces of which will someday tumble into place and make each of us feel so...damn...satisfied?

These are big questions for 9 p.m. EST on a Wednesday night. Especially after the nailbiting conclusion of America's Next Top Model! Which insecure bulimic will weep their way home this week?!

I think if you asked the average viewer what Lost was about, they'd say it's about the big mystery--the smoke monster, the Dharma Initiative, the hatch. Yet if you asked the WRITERS of Lost what the show is about, they'd say it's about the people and their stories.

There's your problem, right there. The fifth or sixth or seventh flashback to Jack's awful marriage may seem exciting to a room full of TV scribes, but most of us sitting at home just want to know what the hell a polar bear was doing in the tropics.

Which brings us to Lost's third season premiere, "A Tale of Two Cities," and the lack of answers therein. After the season two finale (part 1 and part 2), in which answers seemed to arrive fast and furious (So THAT's why the plane crashed! THAT's what the numbers do!), it was easy to assume that maybe we'd get a few more answers in the new season, especially after the insane final scene of last year, which involved an arctic installation and Desmond's ex-girlfriend. CRAZY.

Yet where are we, an hour into season three of this wandering behemoth? Nowhere all that special. We got more Jack angst, this time thanks to a combination platter of his ex-wife and his dad. So he still hates/hated his pop, so much so that he suspects/suspected the guy of sleeping with his wife, even if the only evidence is/was that his wife has called his father on her cell phone. I don't know about you, but my wife has my dad's cell programmed into her phone. It's called a FAMILY, Jack. That's how they work.

Meanwhile, in the now and on the island, Sawyer's playing with a food machine that spits out John Phillips Souza and something called a "fish biscuit," which I'm sure my cat Lucy would also enjoy. Kate showers and dons a lovely sundress for a sinister breakfast on the beach with Henry Gale, who is later called Ben, so maybe that's his real name, or maybe it isn't. And after an interrogation by another Other known as Juliette, Jack opens a doorway that apparently leads straight to the ocean, and then he gets punched in the face. The end, pretty much.

What's confounding to me about this episode is what's largely confounding to me about the entire series--it's never actually BAD television, just frustrating, so it's hard not to enjoy on some level. It's exceptionally produced, with remarkable style and sharp dialogue. In addition, "A Tale of Two Cities" manages to suggest that truly dark days are yet to come, with Henry/Ben promising Kate that "these next two weeks will be rather difficult."

Whatever's in store for our Three Lostketeers, it's not going to be at all fun. That right there is damned intriguing and spooky, thanks not just to the writing but to Michael Emerson, the actor who has always played Henry Gale as a character walking that fine line between innocence and evil. Now we're almost certain he's evil, and Emerson seems to relish the certainty of his character's motivations, which is damned fun to watch.

So we get somewhere and nowhere all at once, what comic book legend Stan Lee would call "the illusion of change." Lost creator and exec producer Damon Lindelof is an admitted comic book fan, and he's clearly taken their plate-spinning plotting style and transmuted it over to the TV realm. Instead of answers, we get more questions, and just enough that's "new" to make us feel like things have moved forward, which they haven't--no paradigms have ever shifted on this show, and while "main characters" have certainly died, they're all red-shirt bullet bait, the kind of c-level cast members just waiting to get tragically killed in the service of the plot.

With the questions about Lost and its byzantine mysteries come any number of doubts--does anyone over there know where things are going? Was there ever a plan? And if not, why should I care?

Having said all that, it was still a damned fine hour of television. Which, as an end of a mostly critical review, is about as frustrating as your average episode of Lost, and that seems just perfect to me.