Answers still in short supply on ABC’s ‘Lost’

In the opening seconds of tonight’s “Lost” (10 p.m., ABC), there’s a long resolve of a beach at sunset, with striated bands of orange and deep red on the horizon and phosphorescent waves crashing on a distant reef.

It’s alluring and unsettling, familiar yet strange. All in all, a classic “Lost” kind of visual.

In the old days – that’d be a season ago – a scene opener like this might send fans, or at least the more compulsively odd ones, scrambling for meaning:

Why a “beach?” What do those colors signify? Do they correspond to the number? Does Alvar Hanso like beaches? And so on.

One of the infuriating charms and undeniable pleasures of the show was that a beach, or just about anything else, could signify something in the overall “Lost” mythology – that word commonly used by “Losties” for the evocative and richly symbolic world that’s all tied into the big mystery.

Then the third season rolled around in October and, over the first six episodes, at least, a cigar was usually just a cigar. A beach? Yeah, that’s the thing with a lot of sand on it. (Or, in this instance, it sets up a flashback for Elizabeth Mitchell’s character, Juliet.)

“Lost” became a different show last fall, with clear plotlines, some thriller components, and a love story as well.

Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) have clinched, so to speak. Jack (Matthew Fox) is jealous – or perhaps about to be pumped and primed for his own star-crossed love affair (see Juliet). Ben is still Ben (Michael Emerson), though feeling much improved after the operation.

As the season’s remaining 16 episodes unfold, uninterrupted by reruns, starting tonight – at a later time slot, to avoid competition with “American Idol” – fans, critics, cultural observers and even ABC could be forgiven for taking a wistful glance over their shoulders.

Reason is, “Lost” was the best show on television for most of its first two seasons, and one of the more influential in TV history. It won an Emmy, set sad-sack ABC back on the road to full recovery, and spawned a subgenre of serials that also played with haute-literary narrative devices such as character point-of-view or time-shifting. (None, with the exception of “Heroes,” has worked, by the way.)

For a brief, shining moment “Lost” made viewers forget that they were just watching a TV set because they were actively engaging it.

They believed – no doubt, many still do – that all the symbols, numbers and visual clues weren’t just clutter but signposts to a deeper meaning and mystery off-screen. “What’s in the hatch?” became a cultural catchphrase.

Then came the backlash. Ratings started to slip (down 19 percent last fall compared to the same six-week period in 2005), viewers clamored for answers, and the nub of a question began to take shape: Where is all this leading and when will it all end?

As the third season wraps four months from now, the show will deliver some answers. Indeed, it has been forced to.

The producers “still have three things going for them,” says Orson Scott Card, the prominent sci-fi novelist (“Ender’s Game”) and editor of a recent book of essays on the show’s meaning, “Getting Lost” (Benbella Books, 2006).

“One, they’ve got the mythology – though if they explain all of that away, then the show’s not mystical or magical anymore; second, the overall conspiracy (and the fact that) everyone’s lying to everyone else and that we need to find out the truth; and finally, the intense character relations,” Card says.

“But every time (producers and writers) give us a glimpse of what’s going on, that leads to a bigger mystery. You can only do that for so long, and I think they’re nearing the end of their rope.”

The end game for “Lost” is “one of the things we’re in discussions with the network about right now,” Carlton Cuse, the show’s co-executive producer, told TV critics at a press tour last month.

“It’s time for us now to find an endpoint for this show. It’s always been discussed that the show would have a beginning, middle and end … (and) once we (figure that out) a lot of the anxiety and a lot of these questions like – ‘we’re not getting answers’ – will go away.”

Those questions, he added, “represent, I think, an underlying anxiety that this is not going to end well or that we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Says Cuse’s production and writing partner, Damon Lindelof: “The only pressure that we’ve ever received from (ABC) is ‘answer some … questions.’ … We have gotten that note, on occasion, (that reads) ‘now it’s time for a nice, rich mythological download.’ “

But the problem with nice, rich downloads is obvious: “Once the mythology is made explicit, I think the mystery goes out of the show,” says Cuse.

Because there was so much convoluted mythology in the first two seasons, ABC research found that some viewers – OK, maybe millions – couldn’t or wouldn’t jump in and out of the show; it required concentration and commitment, which are not always surefire ingredients for success on commercial TV.

So the writers went to Plan B this season: more character development and interaction, and more “exposition” (letting people know just what the heck is going on).

But most viewers who were drawn to “Lost” for the mystery probably could not care less about whether Kate and Sawyer become a pair or whether Jack will become part of the oldest trick on TV – a love triangle. And the more time “Lost” spends in character development, that’s less time spent in solving mysteries.

But the producers have made their choice.

“I think there’s a much larger audience that’s much more interested in who is Kate going to choose than the details about who Alvar Hanso is,” Cuse says.

He and Lindelof are smart guys. They’ll probably figure it out.

In the meantime, love is in the air at “Lost.” Mythology is on forced sabbatical. We’ll get our answers one of these days.

We hope.