Back and Confusing As Ever - Lost

This picture was taken in three different time zones.

"When are we now?"

Lost producers have proclaimed Season Five, the "Season of Sawyer," so it was perhaps not surprising that our favorite shirtless cad uttered the seminal line of last night's episode: "When are we now?"

The notion of when the characters are - as in when on the space-time continuum - is proving to be central to both the season and to the series as a whole. And smack dab in the middle (wherever that might be) of the whole time travel conundrum is Daniel Faraday.

We first see Faraday in "Because You Left," the first of last night's two-episode season premiere. The show opens back in the days of the Dharma Initiative and we see Dr. Marvin Candle (who is mysteriously referred to off-camera as Dr. Chang) sitting down to record one of his many training videos. He's interrupted by a crisis at the Orchid Station, which, as he quickly reveals, contains the energy that makes time travel on the island possible.

This isn't news to Dan, who has situated himself in the bowels of the Orchid Station, posing as a Dharma worker. Flash-forward to the island, post-Ben moving it. Sawyer and Juliet are alive, as are Bernard and Rose, and some other castaways whose names we never care to know. Dan is there too (he has this whole time travel thing down), along with his fellow researchers Charlotte and Miles.

But all is not well post-move. As Dan reveals, either the island or its inhabitants are moving through time, skipping like a record-player. The same people are there from move to move - all those who never left the island, that is - but the times, they are are a-changin'.

Jumping between the past and the future, the inhabitants see events that happened before Oceanic 815 crashed and after. John Locke, for example, sees Yemi's plane crash on the island, the same plane he and Boone found abandoned and filled with skeletal remains in Season One.

All this moving around, however, has dire consequences for those left on the island. Time travel puts them in immediate danger - moving back in time they're attacked by old-school Dharma hostiles who have no idea who they are or how they've landed on the island. But it also puts them in more far-reaching (and nebulous) danger.

Or so say John Locke and Ben. Back in the real world, Locke (aka Jeremy Benthem) paid visits to the Oceanic 6, telling them they must return to the island or those they left behind would face mortal danger. His prophecies get to Jack, who forms a shaky alliance with Ben, who is, as ever, eager to get back to the island for his own purposes.

As we learned at the end of Season Four, the only way to save those left on the island is for all of the Oceanic 6 go back together. Sun, Sayid, Kate, Jack, Hurley, and baby Aaron. Oh, and a dead John Locke. So the process of rounding up the troops begins, and is made all the more complicated by a group of assassins, a tranquilizer darted Sayid, an unwilling Kate, an incarcerated Hurley, and a vengence-filled Sun.

There's work to be done, but only a small window in which to do it, an Event Window (our favorite new phrase of the season). As we learn at the end of the second episode, "The Lie," the Event Window, or amount of time they have to get back to the island, is only 70 hours. That's how long Ben has to get everyone back to the island. Or, as the shrouded scientist (could she be Daniel Faraday's mother?) tells him, "God help us all."

Over all, the episode was impressive and set the stage nicely for the season to come and the eventual end of the show. Producers claim this season will answer more questions than it asks, and I'm inclined to believe them.

I like how Daniel and Desmond were both set up to be key components of the whole time travel mystery. Both have been excellent, complicated additions to the show. I hope we don't see too many survivors vs. natives battles; this was a large part of the early seasons, but not, in my opinion, the strongest part of the show. And, besides, don't we have much bigger things to worry about than flying fire spears?

Like death, eternal life, good vs. evil, and right vs. wrong?