Lost Returns

It's back. Finally. No more Day Break or whatever other crap ABC used to try to fill the Wednesday night slot. Finally, Lost is back. And the writers assure us they have negotiated an end point with ABC, so they can now craft a coherent strategy to reach that point that does not involve going months without answering a single damn question! Perhaps they will also remember that there are characters on the island other than Locke, Jack, Sawyer and Kate. Where is Charlie? Did Rose and Bernard totally disappear from the island? What of Claire, Sayid, Sun, Jin and Hurley? Who is the hotty new Spanish guy? Who knows. But maybe we'll finally get a chance to find out.

Now that Lost is coming back after so many long weeks, let's take a minute to remember where we were:

• Jack, Sawyer and Kate were being held captive by the Others, with Jack segregated in his own bizarre underwater cell while Sawyer and Kate perform forced labour and live in bear cages outdoors
• Juliet was introduced as an inscrutable Other with a medical background and a seeming grudge against Ben (the Other formerly known as Henry Gale)
• Benry promised to let Jack go home (i.e. get the hell off this island) if only Jack would perform a critical life-saving operation on Benry's pesky tumour
• Surprise: The Others live in suburbia on a totally different island
• The spooky black smoke killed Eko
• We got a glimpse of a freaky guy with an eye-patch who seemed to be watching the island on a bunch of TV monitors
• Sawyer and Kate had sex - and Jack got to see a little of the action on closed-circuit pay-per-view
• Sun shot an Other, so...
• One of the Others decided he wanted to shoot Sawyer in the head but was stopped just in time when...
• Jack threatened to let Benry die on the operating table unless Sawyer and Kate were released

Tonight's episode is called Lost In Portland. Apparently, we will see Juliet's flashback. Excellent. At this point, anyone but Kate! Then, we know that next week is a Desmond episode (hurrah!), so we may get see what happened to him after the hatch explosion and why he was naked. Also excellent.