‘Lost’ to answer nagging questions in finale

What makes it work
In practice, the show’s biggest threat was, on the contrary, its vast possibilities.

Among the many original acquaintances the viewer made were: Kate, the freckled former jailbird (Evangeline Lilly); Hurley (Jorge Garcia), the portly sweepstakes tycoon who says “dude” a lot; Jack, the doctor (Matthew Fox); and the mystical outdoorsman, Locke (Terry O’Quinn). But there is no shortage of new characters — both friends and enemies — replenishing what we first knew as the core group.

Every character represents another point of contact for the viewer, and another point-of-view: any event has multiple versions, thanks to each person who experienced it. Meanwhile, the flashbacks to characters’ lives before that fateful crash let the series time-shift and place-shift wherever it might roam beyond the island.

As I envision the show’s future, I can imagine a subset of characters somehow escaping from the island to rejoin the “real” world — where they are unable or unwilling to arrange help for the castaways they left behind. The series, while remaining on the island but also tracking the tortured readjustment of The Returnees, could then further expand to coexist in two or more realms at the same time.

That’s just an idea, and maybe a lousy one.

My larger point is that, as “Lost” concludes a second year, it has demonstrated that what might have first seemed to be a silly gimmick — a random bunch of people thrown together in a crisis — instead has nearly inexhaustible potential for development.

The only real limits: writers’ fatigue and viewers’ fickleness. But on a series where dangers seem to lurk everywhere, neither of those seems likely to be among them anytime soon.

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