'Lost': Season 5 countdown! New toys! Geek heartbreak! Videos!

'Lost': Season 5 countdown! New toys! Geek heartbreak! Videos!
Nov 19, 2008, 09:45 AM by Jeff Jensen

Categories: 'Lost'
Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008. Just eight days until Thanksgiving. Thirty-two days until Hanukkah. Thirty-six days until Christmas. And 63 days until the season premiere of Lost. Freakin’ Lost! Whoo-hoo! Can’t you feel the butterflies of excited anticipation flittering in your gut in that mildly uncomfortable way that kinda makes you wanna go poop? I sure do!

Of course, there are other, potentially less flatulent ways to express your Lost enthusiasm. Tonight, for example, if you live in the Lost Angeles area, you could head over to Meltdown Comics (7522 West Sunset Blvd.) at 7 p.m. and meet executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof as well as several of their writing staff cohorts. They’ll be there to pick up their weekly allotment of new comics, no doubt (I hear Carlton is a huge Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers fan) (if you don’t get the reference, you must be 18 or older to Google it), as well as sign autographs to mark the release of a new line of Lost toys marketed by Kubrick, the super-cool Japanese company that specializes in small, blocky collectible figurines. (Google search for images. I like 'em all, especially the sad-faced Hurley...though Kate looks a little Fabio to me.) Feel free to scream and faint with I just met the Jonas Brothers and I’ll never wash my eyeballs again! hysterical glee — I hear Damon and CC totally love that.

In the meantime, here's a new Lost mystery to puzzle over. Have you guys seen this?




It’s a series of short video clips for...well, no one quite knows for sure. In fact, my emails to certain peeps in the Lost camp were returned with equally baffled reactions. The assumption is that these clips are merely promotional spots touting Lost broadcasts in Britain. But the content — Sayid bursting through the doors of what appears to be a new Dharma station and then being seized by various morphing substances shaped like the numerals 1, 2, and 3 — has fans buzzing and mulling the significance, if any. My theory? Smokey lives in a Dharma lab when he isn't hunting castaways -- and he has siblings. Yep: the crazy season is upon us!

Yet where God opens a Lost door, he must close one, although maybe not all the way. There has been an intriguing -- and possibly disappointing -- new development in the show’s latest between-seasons, reality-blurring, Internet-based alternate reality game. Since July, the Dharma Initiative has been recruiting Lost fans via dharmawantsyou.com to volunteer for a new version of the weird science outfit. The game/narrative has been moving rather slowly for some, but the expectation of all has been that it'll begin to pick up and start paying off the closer we get to the new season. But yesterday, participants received an email from Hans Van Eeghen, head of Dharma recruiting, announcing that due to the current financial crisis, Dharma has gone bust. Writes Van Eeghen: “This stunning reversal of fortune has forced us to abandon our ambitious plans. In fact, absent this funding, the Dharma Initiative was forced to make the only sensible decision we had available: we sold the Dharma Initiative to the television show LOST.” The email goes onto to indicate that participants can expect to soon hear from Cuse and Lindelof about what will happen next. My sources declined to comment, but I fear that this email is ABC’s coy way of announcing that the ARG is being revised, curtailed, or canceled altogether due to the economic downturn that has mandated budget cuts throughout all of Hollywood. When we know for certain, we’ll let you know. Post your insanity below.