By now everyone has heard of the tv show Lost. When the show first started, I could tell people "The show is about some plane crash survivors who crashed on a deserted island." Eventually that statement evolved into, "It's about some plane crash survivors who crashed on a mysterious island." Now, I can't say with any certainty that they were survivors, or that the plane crashed as opposed to being shot down, or even that they are on an island! All I know is that it started with a plane that fell out of the sky for one reason or another, that some people seem to have survived it, and they landed on a big piece of land next to a big body of water.

Each episode only confuses it. There are numbers which are made to seem important, but then the creators of the show do an interview where they say that the meaning is irrelevant. There are people who are dead or even completely fictional, but they walk around occasionally so that a character can stumble onto something important. And all of the survivors seem to have met before, and despite them taking the time to show us this, the creators once again tell us it is meaningless.

So what is a viewer left to do? You can stop tuning in, but at this point, everyone wants just one satisfactory answer to one of the seventeen bazillion questions the show has posed, so nobody will stop watching yet. You can keep tuning in and follow all of the clues. You can decide that the numbers hold great significance because Jesus had 12 disciples and 4+8=12, and that Jack Shepherd must have a god-complex. Or, you can do as I have. Watch the show. Enjoy it. The next day, go to www.thefuselage.com and see what the show freaks have come up with concerning the previous night's Hanso commercial. Then, you get all the cool "easter eggs" without losing your mind typing in numbers all over the internet.

I predict in the end, none of the answers will satisfy me. How could they? They have been built up into such mythic proportions that when one falls short, I will have to keep watching for the next answer. And so on and so forth. In the end, it's brilliant really. I'll reach the end of the series and be upset that they didn't solve it the way I wanted it solved. But the important thing from a marketing aspect is that I watched until the end of the series...