Lost Hiatus Happenings

As any fine connoisseur of good TV knows, Lost returns on January 21st. This news means two awesome things. For one, Lost is back! The engrossing, thought-provoking, mind-bending, geek-elating, mystery-inducing show returns t entertain us for 16 weeks and answer at least some of the questions left over the hiatus. For two, the hiatus is over!

The magnificence of Lost when it is on the air only magnifies the withdrawal when it is not. This last stretch left us Lostless for 8 months! However, since the show's inception the producers take pity on us by providing inter-season distractions via Alternate Reality Games. This hiatus proved no exception.

The ARG started out with a commercial during last season's finale inviting you to join the NEW Dharma Initiative. Once joining, you received emails inviting you to play different online aptitude tests. The producers learned their lesson least season and concurrently leaked the answers and cheats on other websites. Anyone that used the answers and cheats to ring up inhuman success found out at the end of the series they failed miserably. Well played ARG creators!

Of course, the ultimate aptitude test and selection of the participants for the new Dharma Initiatve would occur at Comic-Con. Coincidentally, each preceding year the Lost Producers (Damon Lindeloff and Carlton Cuse) held a session where they answered questions and then revealed some little nugget to get Lost fans hooked for the coming season. For example, before Season 4 they showed a video of a Dharma tutorial for a station called "The Orchid" that contained bunnies that seemed to disobey traditional space-time expectations (which as you should remember is where we ended up at the end of Season 4).

This Comic-Con proved no exception as you can see in the video below. For those of you spoiler-avoiders out there that want to start the season "clean", I offer you my rationalization for why this video is not a spoiler. I define spoiler as something the producers would not want us to see prior to the airing of an episode. Since this comes straight from the producers, it is, in fact, not a spoiler.



There's a couple of interesting nuggets in the video

• Looks like the final answer on the good doctor's name is Pierre Chang.
• Whoever operates the camera sounds very familiar. Daniel Faraday? Horace Goodspeed? 
• Baby's cryin'! But whose baby? If Charlotte used to be on the island, is it her? If it's Pierre's child could it be Miles Strom? 
• He has a working arm which is not always the case of a Dharma training video. Notice how he talks about the purge and looks down worriedly at his arm. 
• "Time is not of the essence, it is the essence." Considering how the last season ended we're certainly in for some time traveling this season. 

Soon after Comic-Con the ARG pittered out. The website blamed the economy and stated the procuders of the ABC show Lost would take over the site. Since then those that signed up received weekly videos from the producers with nuggets to whet our appetites on the coming season. For example, we can look forward to more Smokey and for those of you with a thing for undead footwear we'll find out why Christian Shephard wore white tennis shoes when he appeared to Jack in Season 1. 

Oh, and it appears a new ARG started up on this website for Ajira Airways. Nothing much to find there except except for some polar bears and a promise for new flights on January 21st...a magical date indeed!