TV is the New Reading

“Lost” is an excellent

show that makes no

sense whatsoever

This week’s episode of “Lost” took the wackiness to new heights, and I for one am loving it. This is what I’m talking about, I said. This is where this story needed to be going.

Last season we got a tantalizing glimpse at how time-travel works in the imagination of the show’s creators. In the episode titled “The Constant,” “Lost” islander Desmond Hume’s consciousness became unstuck in time and carried memories and experiences back and forth as his character’s past life unfolded on screen, which ultimately helped him to escape from the island.

This season, the lostaways -- now a ragtag collection of Oceanic Flight 815 plane crash survivors, Dharma initiative operatives and investigators of some stripe or another -- have become unfixed in time since Ben -- one-time leader of the Others -- moved the island.

How’d he move the island? By turning a big wheel buried deep underground, of course. Ben reappeared in Tunisia (naturally), and the island -- which has already exhibited plenty of weirdness, experiencing a strange electromagnetic buildup every 108 minutes (apparently done with, now) a smoke monster and some sort of crazy-making barrier that’s hard to get through without losing one’s mind -- moved someplace else.

I repeat: The island moved.

Anyway, ever since Ben did that (however it was that he did that), these weird lights have been flashing across the sky and, once they pass, the lostaways discover themselves at new and different points in the island’s history.

This doesn’t in any way explain anything. But what the writers have been very good about so far is keeping all of this time travel stuff within the perspective of the lostaways. They experience different histories as they travel across the island, but so far the flashing lights only affect a specific collection of travelers -- people who were present and alive when Ben moved the island. They’re forced to accept what’s happening to them, but they’re not privy to any information as to why it’s happening to them. And scarily enough, some of them have been experiencing nosebleeds -- some of them fatal.

As of this week, a group of lostaways who managed to escape last season and who actually witnessed the island moving -- the Oceanic Six -- have gathered in a strange church in Los Angeles, where Eloise Faraday -- a woman who knows a lot more than she’s sharing -- shows them a means of finding the island again, which is apparently important, although no one will say why.

And John Locke -- one of the lostaways from the plane crash -- has managed to access the buried chamber and secure that big wheel Ben used to move the island in the first place, which has also received no explanation.

While it feels like it’s providing more answers and clues as to what’s going on than it has in the past, the show in fact doesn’t make a lick of sense and requires more suspension of disbelief with each successive episode.

That being said, it’s certainly entertaining in its weirdness and even, on some level, satisfying. It’s a fresh perspective on such concepts as bilocation and time travel and psychic phenomena, some excellent food for thought, and honestly, it’s way more interesting than if it were just a bunch of plane crash survivors eking out an existence while lost on a desert island.

As the episodes tick down to the final season, the standard for storytelling has been set very high.

“Lost” airs at 8 p.m. Wednesdays on ABC.

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