Lost! Lost! More Lost!

Oooh!!! Here's some major goodness from EW:

Among the many theories that have been formulated to explain the island, the monster, the numbers, and the 666 additional mysteries lurking within ABC's Emmy-winning drama Lost, the most popular is that the passengers of Oceanic flight 815 are stuck in purgatory. But here in a lush thicket of jungle on Oahu, life bears a closer resemblance to a ring of hell reserved for torturing pretty Hollywood actors.

In the shadow of a crooked tree, Matthew Fox (Jack) and Evangeline Lilly (Kate) bat away hungry gnats dive-bombing their glistening skin. Outside the vine-choked doors of the hatch, Harold Perrineau (Michael) is being painted with sticky fake blood. And stomping through the underbrush is Josh Holloway (Sawyer), his dimpled mug pinched with panic. Things are a little crazy around here today, since sequences for the final four hours of Lost's brilliantly puzzling second season are being shot concurrently. And — oops — Holloway prepared for the wrong scene. Now he's cramming for a cumbersome mouthful of typical Sawyer snark. '''The artist formerly known as Henry Gale' — what is that?'' says the actor, shaking his head. He asks if he can ditch the tricky quip. Nope. Make it work, he's told.

And he does, though the scene itself ends tragically, with Jack and the gang learning that Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez) and Libby (Cynthia Watros) have been shot — by Michael, no less, though he has pinned their murders on that duplicitous Gale guy. Now the stage has been set for a fateful confrontation with the ominous, jungle-dwelling Others in the two-hour May 24 season finale. ''Being the one who pulled the trigger was freaky,'' says Perrineau. ''The hatch used to feel like a safe haven. Now ghosts live there.'' Burying his wildly bearded face in his hands, he half jokes: ''Why am I doing this career? I don't have to kill anyone if I work construction!''

Such is the soul-searching that takes place when you're part of the most enigmatic enterprise on television. In fact, a visit to the set of the cult pop phenomenon suggests a new Big Theory for the show: Lost has become an allegory for itself. A group of people on an island, their fates shaped by unseen, life-threatening Others — namely, the show's Burbank-based writers, and the 15.3 million viewers who are simultaneously fascinated by and frustrated with its peekaboo plot development. ''I've never had a truer sense of not knowing what the hell is going on than I've had working on this show,'' says Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Mr. Eko). ''The only way you can influence your fate is to put your soul into your performance and hope it registers with the audience.''

If there were ever a time for Lost's cast to make a good impression, it would be now. In a clearing of crunchy grass, the nefarious Mr. Friendly (M.C. Gainey) twirls a bolo and barks at his fellow Others: ''Don't shoot! We need him.'' At the beach, long-lost button pusher Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) chugs from a bottle of booze and spills a secret. (Hint: It's sick.) Down in the hatch, Eko mops up Libby's blood and speaks of damnation. And as they load their weapons, Jack and Sawyer bond over the memory of Ana Lucia. ''At least I get to kill somebody now,'' says Sawyer, cocking his shotgun with an emphatic crack. ''Brutal'' is how Naveen Andrews (Sayid) describes the finale. ''People here are scared. They want to know if they're going to survive.''

Fox, on the other hand, calls it ''mind-blowing. It leaves us scattered and vulnerable in the face of a larger foe — or who we think is a larger foe — and walks us right up to the start of next season.''

Executive producer Damon Lindelof vows a darker and more revealing finale than last year's still-unresolved Walt-napping, and that inconclusive peek into the hatch. This time, we'll see Walt again, learn what caused Oceanic flight 815 to crash, find out what that mysterious button actually does (if anything), and more. Lost co-pilots Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are already sweating the feedback. Their sophomore-season ambition was to spin a complex and surprisingly personal story that pushed the Lost saga to a defining moment. Now it's time to face the judges. ''I feel like we've been practicing a dive in anticipation of the Olympics,'' says Lindelof. ''But until we break through the surface, and hear the audience reaction, we won't know if we've executed it.''

Secrets and lies, scams and conspiracies, mystical visions and mind games, all embedded with densely coded allusions and other distracting tidbits — that's been the Matrix-y stuff of Lost's second year, one that was perfectly epitomized by the big reveal of the island's fabled monster: a tentacle of billowing black smoke, flickering with fleeting images. Lost used to be merely intriguing: Now it's about as shifty as a White House press conference. ''Season 1 was about 'Here we are,''' explains Lindelof. ''Season 2 has been going deeper: 'What is our reality? Are we really here? Is this even a place on the planet?'''

Lindelof and Cuse (who came aboard when co-creator J.J. Abrams left after Lost's seventh episode to direct Mission: Impossible III) began sussing out season 2 last spring by brainstorming the contents of the show's Pandora's box: the hatch, a quarantined bunker buried beneath the jungle. The producers always had some general ideas, but now they had specific names. Desmond. Alvar Hanso. Dr. Marvin Candle. The Dharma Initiative. And the button, a computer key that must be pushed every 108 minutes lest...something happen. ''When they pitched the button, my first reaction was 'No f---ing way!' And I mean that in a good way,'' says ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson, who denies rumors that the network mandated the hit series steer clear of the sci-fi side of the road. ''I'm constantly amazed by their imaginations.''

Lost's shepherds are also deep-thinking guys whose soulful concerns are imprinted on the show. Lindelof, 33, and Cuse, 47, both speak of spiritual awakenings during adulthood; they aspire to use Lost as a vehicle to tell stories of redemption and, according to Cuse, explore the question of ''how does one lead a life.'' During the show's conception, Lindelof was grappling with an array of internal debates prompted by the death of his father. At the same time, he was falling in love with his future wife, and finding the spiritual connection he was seeking through exposure to her Catholic beliefs. ''For me,'' he says, ''Lost is about meaning — and the search for meaning.''

For the actors tasked with embodying this journey, season 2 has required a risky leap of faith, and not just because they're usually kept in the dark about the plot. (Says Yunjin Kim, who plays Sun: ''When a character reaches some kind of redemption, perhaps it's time to start packing your bag.'') The cast was warned that new characters and an infusion of island mythology were likely to yield a different kind of show from season 1 — and less screen time. ''It hasn't been easy,'' says Dominic Monaghan (Charlie). ''I like to work. You just have to submit to the storytelling.'' Adds Daniel Dae Kim, who plays Jin: ''The challenge for all the actors now is to find our place in the mythology. Because clearly, if there is no place for us, we won't be around. The deaths on this show have shown that.''

Even the second season's central figures have wrestled with Lost's evolving texture, perhaps none more so than Terry O'Quinn, who has gone from boar-hunting mystic to hatch-trapped cosmic victim. ''I've told the producers that I miss the old John Locke,'' says O'Quinn. ''I wish he hadn't found those damn buttons sometimes. But these ups and downs reflect everybody's. You can't always choose the way things go. That's life.'' But those who persevere are rewarded with enlightenment. Holloway says he was baffled and bothered by all the fat jokes that producers were giving Sawyer to lob at Hurley (Jorge Garcia), not knowing they were setting the stage for Hurley's meltdown in April 5's trippy, I-see-imaginary-friends episode. Says Holloway: ''That's when I learned [to] trust these writers. They know what they're doing.''
Wellll...almost. They did cast Michelle Rodriguez as Ana Lucia, whose surly portrayal of the haunted cop polarized audiences. ''In the case of Michelle, there seemed to be a split in opinion over what she was like as an actor and what she was like as a character,'' concedes Cuse. But ''we feel Michelle fulfilled the role we wrote for her.'' Ana Lucia's death, he adds, was always part of the plan, and in fact, the Blue Crush star requested a one-year tour of duty. But her rough edges did scuttle plans for a romance with Jack, and contributed to the decision to make the May 10 episode a double homicide. Watros, however, wasn't initially marked for death: ''We worried [Ana Lucia's] death might not have the [same] emotional resonance as if we had killed a sympathetic character. By adding Libby to the death toll, it would really intensify the audience's feeling toward Michael going into the final episodes,'' explains Cuse, who denies that Rodriguez and Watros were targeted because of their much-publicized arrests for drunk driving. While producers declined to reveal their original intentions for Libby, they will say that Hurley's secret loony-bin admirer will pop up in Desmond's flashback in the season finale, as well as other characters' flashbacks next year. (While Watros recently shot a CBS comedy pilot, she'll still be available for future Lost episodes.)

Additional plans for Lost's third season are also taking shape. There will be new locations and new characters (one rumor has Desmond joining the cast full-time, but producers won't comment). The season's big theme sounds timely, twisty, and terrifying. Hints Lindelof: '''Us versus Them.' But who's the 'us,' and who's the 'them'?'' And perhaps the most promising tease of all for Lost fans will be a welcome change in ABC's erratic, repeat-heavy scheduling of the show, which the producers believe has hindered their serialized storytelling. McPherson doesn't disagree. ''The ideal schedule for this series would be to run for 22 consecutive weeks,'' he says. ''But we have a 35-week season. We are looking at a number of scenarios, like the possibility of three huge chunks.''

Of course, another theory could explain why Lost is down about 200,000 viewers from last year (and it's not just because it now faces American Idol's results show): Some viewers may simply have reached ambiguity overload. Truth is, Lost has to be judicious about plot development. Lindelof and Cuse say they would love to write the drama knowing that it had an end point, ideally about five seasons. But Cuse believes the show can survive on character-driven redemption tales for years, and both he and Lindelof recognize that Lost must deliver the goods, however long it's on the air. ''The more I hear about disgruntled Americans who believe there never was an exit strategy for Iraq, the more I understand why they want to know that the story we're telling has a...well, an exit strategy,'' says Lindelof. ''If they can't get answers to mysteries in real life, they most definitely want answers on their TV sets on Wednesday nights. And they deserve them.''

What those answers will be remains to be seen. Fox, at least, is willing to say what one of them won't be. ''Nobody is going to wake up on this show and mysteriously end up somewhere else.'' Promise? ''That's a promise.''

Told of Fox's pledge, Lindelof betrays a mischievous smirk. ''Well, then,'' he says, ''I guess we're going to have to do that.''