Recap hour will bring ”Lost” fans up to speed

Lost? Join the club.

ABC’s “Lost,” one of the biggest hits of the current TV season, also is one of the most addictive.

But at this point, if you actually claim to know what’s going on, you must be J.J. Abrams or Damon Lindelof – who created the thriller and swear they have its mythology firmly mapped out in their minds.

Our minds, meanwhile, are full of questions.

Is Boone really dead? Should we worry about Claire’s baby? What’s up with those mysterious, deadly lottery numbers? Will someone else really die in the season finale (which airs May 25), and if so, who?

ABC won’t answer those questions in tonight’s special, “Lost: The Journey” (8 p.m., KXLY-4 in Spokane). Still, the hour-long recap is, for once, not just a cheap way to stretch out a hit show. This time, it’s a public service.

“Lost,” following the survivors of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 after a crash on a mysterious tropical island, is complex, convoluted and cunning – the kind of devilishly detailed drama that inspires Internet fan groups to a fever pitch of discussion. Theories and spoilers abound as online chatters debate every nuance of every episode.

The less obsessed, however, may find our heads spinning at this point, even if we’ve never missed an episode.

With that in mind, ABC has put together “Lost: The Journey.”

It will focus on core characters – Jack (Matthew Fox); Kate (Evangeline Lilly); Sawyer (Josh Holloway); Claire (Emilie de Ravin) and others – and their back stories, looking at what might have led them to the island. It also will explore the island itself, “which may reveal some of its secrets.”

Here are some things we know for sure:

• Flight 815 originated in Australia but somehow wound up so far off course that the survivors (at least 46 of them, including 14 main characters) can’t be found.

• Each episode takes place on one day, or possibly two, so after a full season, only about a month will have passed. That explains why portly Hurley (Jorge Garcia) hasn’t lost more weight yet.

• There were once other people on the island, part of a scientific expedition shipwrecked 16 years earlier. But all are now dead, according to a strange Frenchwoman whose voice was heard on a repeating radio transmission and who later turned up in the jungle.

• At least one other person not on the plane also showed up, the murderous Ethan, but after kidnapping Claire, he was shot to death by her protector, Charlie (Dominic Monaghan).

• Locke and Boone found a metal door, apparently a hatch, on the jungle floor and struggled in secret to open it, but failed.

• Hurley once won a lottery with numbers that turned out to be cursed. The same numbers – 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 – are inscribed on the hatch and were also written on a map recovered from the Frenchwoman.

• Hunting boar, Locke met … something. We still don’t know what that something was. We also don’t know where the polar bear killed in the jungle came from.

• Claire, who gave birth in the most recent new episode, was warned by a psychic not to let her child be raised “by others.” But she boarded the plane for Los Angeles with the intention of giving him up for adoption.

• Michael (Harold Perrineau) is building a raft to escape from the island. On his first try, someone burned it. (Gilligan, perhaps?)

Ah, but there’s so much more we don’t know – as in, is this a real island, or maybe purgatory?

And the concern among fans now is that we’ll never get satisfactory answers as a reward for all this attention.

At an ABC event at Universal Studios in January, I sat down at a table with an anonymous-looking young man who turned out to be co-creator Lindelof.

He was joined by Bryan Burke, another executive producer, and soon a small group of TV critics had turned outright obsessive, peppering the producers with questions about the show’s mysteries.

We learned no secrets, but did find out that Lindelof and his team worry constantly about letting fans down by promising more than is delivered. Shows like “Twin Peaks,” which turned out to go nowhere, and “The X-Files,” which stretched its mythology to impossible lengths, wound up frustrating and disappointing their most devoted followers.

So can we at least get an answer on the polar bear?