Lost might have easily been MIA by now. The television drama’s concept – plane crash survivors fight to stay alive on an eerily remote island in the Pacific – seemed too gimmicky to generate sufficient juice for a weekly series.  

But leave it to J.J. Abrams, the dizzyingly inventive architect of Alias, and partner Damon Lindelof (Crossing Jordan) to create a genre-bending, character-driven thriller that, in five short weeks, has managed to become TV’s most addictive new drama. Suddenly, anyone worth his water-cooler is buzzing about Lost’s world: What crime might feisty fugitive Kate (Evangeline Lilly) have committed? How exactly did Locke (Terry O’Ouinn), a paraplegic before the doomed Oceanic Airlines flight, regain the use of his legs and become the island’s lean, mean, wild boar-killing machine? Is Jack’s (Matthew Fox) drunken, demanding dad really dead? And what is that unseen, malevolent monster that made mincemeat out of the plane’s pilot?