[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

I have a soft spot for tortured Jack Shephard. Why, you ask? Well, I find a bearded, miserable, pill-popping mess to be an eminently relatable character in my life. I should probably be sticking to more fringe ideas this early into my month-long extravaganza. But I was driving around today in my car, and I was like, you know what totally sold me on LOST? Bearded Jack at the end of Season 3, screaming “We have to go back!”

It blew my god damn mind. Up until that point, LOST was a pretty cool show, but it never succeeded in blowing my mind. The hatch kicked my ass, but episodes covering them setting up mini-golf courses and shit had me snoring.

In fact, I had zoned out during the middle of Season 2, leaving it behind while the gang scavenged around the island and spent entire episodes walking from Point A to Point B interwoven with character back story. However, at the behest of a couple of friends, I caught up, and watched Season 3 enjoying myself. I mean, there were polar bear cages, and we got to see Locke get shoved out of a building by his own father. All of this was pretty awesome.

But the moment where I realized, and let’s be honest, you too realized, that the writers of LOST had given up sanity for awesomeness is when this show kicked it up another notch. There are moments in television when I run around my room screaming, too excited for my big squishy to handle. And when it was made known that not only Jack gotten off the island, but also that he wanted to go back on it? Fucking extreme, man! Extreme!

It was a game changer, because it completely demolished the existing structure of the show. The show was enjoyable, but it seemed rather static. They’re marching around an island they don’t know shit about, trying to escape. There’s a pile of smoke chasing them, and some old bastard named Ben Linus has a weird voice and spends episodes reading The Brothers Karamzov. But after that episode?

I had to ask myself, what the fuck was going on? Let me get this straight, they…got off the island? And they’re off, but where and when are they? And who died? And wha..what? Jesus lord, hold me. And they want to go back? And how did they get off? And my nose is bleeding from awesomeness, or the thirteen Diet Mountain Dews I drank during it, or maybe a combination of both?

Also, it marked a rather curious shift away from the Jack we had known and loved. Sure, the dude had his demons, and he had clashed in an epic throwdown between him sporting…Lockeian Empricism versus Locke’s Unwavering Faith. But here was the dude laid low, unraveling before the viewer’s eyes. He’d come along way from being total Maverick from Top Gun being able to sew up his own gashes and shit.

And since then? They’ve seemed to shift away from Jack. He’s been edged out by the Helicopter Brigade, and Richard Alpert, and a bunch of other bullshit afoot. Not in a bad way, mind you. But I still think the dude has something left to give the show, and ever the optimist, I can’t help but feel he’ll be the hero of the show. This is while acknowledging of course, that this type of show probably won’t have the archetypal hero. All of their characters coming packing a minimum amount of loathsome. Perhaps I’m putting too much significance to how central he was to the early portions of the show, and perhaps I just love the guy too much to have some correct perspective in the house.

But what I do know, is that when Jack: Sexy Bearded Hobo edition warbled to Kate that they had to return to the Island, I began to worship at the altar of Damon Lindelof. I began speaking with Pepsibones yesterday after kicking off this crap, and we talked about how brilliantly the show unfolded.

You see, even though I’m convinced the writers were directionless and flailing in the night at first, the show’s slow boil into time-traveling madness made it all the better. If they had shoved the show into some mind-warping merry-go-round right from the start, it wouldn’t have developed the world and the characters. And sure, there were times where I yawned and probably tugged the pud in the middle of S2 and S3, but the laborious groundwork they laid through the first three seasons have resulted in S4 and S5 being the best damn television I’ve ever watched.

And it all changed when snot-covered, oxy-snorting Jack asked that whore Kate to come back with him.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

LOST starts one month today. One month until my favorite show on television begins its final run. I fucking love LOST. It isn’t my favorite show of all time – Billy Adama and the Space Cadets hold that award. But I can also acknowledge that LOST is roughly four-million times better in the areas of plot, and smoke monsters, and other shit.

So let’s start at the fucking beginning. Look at the god damn promotional picture for season one. It’s almost hilarious in its simplicity, and for what has occurred since then. You know, just a bunch of people foraging for food and trying to survive on an island. I was sold on that premise alone! I mean, there was like a monster and shit! And that guy from Party of Five, and a fucking hobbit!

How could I not be sold?

And now I look at that shit, and I just shake my head. How the hell did we get from crashing planes, to hypertextual mind-warping, time-traveling madness? I thought the biggest problem Jack Shephard was going to have was getting his weiner into Kate’s love nest. Turns out that oh yeah, she’s a filthy whore with linebacker shoulders (this will all be gone into within the month, I’m sure) and he is seeing his dead dad and rocketing through the space time continuum.

The dudes from LOST knew what they were doing, even when they didn’t know what they were doing. How so? I’ll explain it to you, chuckles! Even if they didn’t know how they were going to connect all the dots of the series, they threw us enough hooks that we had to keep watching. I mean, when that fat dude from Heroes, Parkman, gets eaten out of the cockpit of the airplane? Yeah, I had to keep watching. And then there’s some mysterious hatch or something?

Yeah, dope as hell.

Somehow LOST has managed to tell me absolutely nothing for like five and a half years, and I’m still hooked.

Remember though, when the fucking plane crashed? Of course you do, it was the start of the show. What a hell of a way to kick off the pilot though. I’d like to spin the Island’s wheel, travel through time, and masturbate JJ Abrams for his ballin’ pilot. It was god damn madness. Dudes were getting sucked into still firing engines, Jack was like totally stitching himself off, and the hobbit was a god damn heroin addict.

I distinctly remember sitting in my friend Dave’s room, watching it. It was one of the first shows to show off the thunderous erection that we take for granted now: HD television. Maybe I’m imagining it, and I’m definitely not putting much thought into proving myself wrong, but LOST seems like it was one of the shows that kicked off television as spectacle. It was in HD, it was in 5.1, and you definitely got a bigger bang for your buck. I sat there, thinking to myself, I need a fucking HDTV!

I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time. It is something of a cultural phenomenon within the geek circles, and even branching out into other walks of life. The average asshole has no idea that they’re getting a lesson in utilitarian ethics, rocking out with Jeremy Bentham, or the delicious irony that John Locke the philosopher was   the ultimate empiricist, while the character they named him after seems to be a man of faith and blind belief.

Other nerdy shit like that. Viral marketing, altered reality games, clues wrapped within websites, insanity. Other television shows and movies do that now, but I feel like LOST was the first one to do it, or at least that I recognized.

Anyways, intro over. Let’s party until the party really starts.

Like any nerd with a sense of purpose, I’m awaiting the finale season of LOST with an unhealthy rabidity. I’ll be clear, I absolutely loved season 5. And season 4. And most of season 3. And I’ve been amazed at how well Lindelof et all have been tying together the various strands from all the seasons past. Especially since you couldn’t convince me at knife point to agree that they had it all planned since the beginning. That said, this doesn’t surprise me whatsoever:

Via /Film

While speaking at a Seattle music and arts festival, Lost exec-producers Carlton Cuse, Eddy Kitsis, and Adam Horowitz dropped several morsels of goodness for fans. First off, they reiterated that we shouldn’t expect every single mystery to be solved come the series finale at the end of season six.

And I’m fine with that. It all depends on how they let you draw your own conclusions, and what they do tell. I really want to know what the fuck the Island is. Who doesn’t? But they don’t need to heavy-handily explain why there were polar bears running around and crap. We can draw our own conclusions on stuff like that. So I guess I’m torn. I want to know what Smokey/Facob/the Island is, but I’m also content with being able to string together other plotlines myself.

Where do you guys stand?