Lost, Season 5: Que alguien me expliiiiqueeee....

I think I may have spoken too soon when I favourably compared Lost to Heroes recently, stating that at least it doesn't fling you around alternative and parallel timelines until you end up with a nose-bleed.

But that's exactly the sort of treatment which the first episode of season five seems to presage. I'm assuming that the fact that the plot development appears to be causing this unfortunate symptom in one of the characters is something of a visual joke.

And now Desmond gets told that he's "special", just like Claire the Cheerleader. The normal rules, such as they are, don't apply to this pair. Do these shows riff off each other?

It all used to be so simple. We had the 'present' timeline on the island, interpenetrated with sequential flashbacks to key moments in the life of a single survivor, or a related group of survivors like the Koreans.

The switch to flash-forwards took a little getting used to, then came some more temporally ambiguous jumps, and now we've got dead people turning up all over the place....one of the signature features of the narrative mayhem that is Heroes. Gnnnngh.

Still, with Lost at least, I continue to hold on to the view that someone somewhere must know what's going on...