The first time I saw a Lost promo on ABC this winter, my heart skipped a beat.

“Whoo-hoo! It’s coming back!” I cheered. “Finally, we’ll get some answers!”

My girlfriend and I have been anxiously awaiting the return of our favorite mind-melting TV show since last season’s finale. In case you aren’t a “Lostie” (a word of which I’m not particularly fond), just know that a whole bunch of crap happened in last year’s finale, most notably a Hydrogen bomb exploding in the final seconds that may or may not set everything back to first principles.

Yes, five years into the show, in anticipation of its final season, the people in charge may or may not have reset the deck and started everything over.  I keep hedging with that “may or may not” phrase because, quite honestly, where the show goes from here is anybody’s guess.

At the end of Season 3, certain members of the cast had been removed from the island at some later date than the action we had by then been privy to and placed back in the Real World, establishing an out-of-sequence storytelling construct that dominated the ensuing two seasons. At the end of Season 4, Ben moved the island (no shit) and the “survivors” were headed for “rescue.” At the end of Season 5, after spending most of the season jumping back-and-forth in time across thirty years while parallel groups of survivors developed simultaneous story arcs in different eras (yes, that’s correct), we finally got a look at Jacob, met this new “Man in Black” character, realized Locke wasn’t resurrected (not in the purest sense of the word), and then that Hydrogen bomb went off.

And those are just the three finales. Supposedly, the first two seasons (of which I’ve caught some, but not most) were also full of mind-humps, but those of a more facts-on-the-ground variety. For instance, no time travel, no island moving, and no sign of Jacob, the Messiah-type character who somehow controls everything that happens on the island (or so we thought…describing this makes my head hurt), interacting with the show’s characters before they got to the island (oh, right, that also happen in last season’s finale).

If none of what you’ve read makes sense, well, that’s kind of my point. Lost has developed a storytelling style as non-linear as one can possibly be. Which sounds like hyperbole, but consider that, five years in, we still don’t know anything essential about the island: why certain people don’t age, why women can’t have babies, why the island heals the sick, why long-dead people from time-to-time return, how they do so, or how the island itself can be moved. We also don’t know, not really, why it’s such a prize to find this island, how people have ever found it, and why characters fight to the death like the protagonists of a James Bond film for knowledge concerning it.

Don’t get me wrong. Lost is one of my favorite TV shows, probably ever, for many of the reasons listed above. Sometimes it’s nice not knowing, not having every detail force-fed, Lost a blessed respite from the predictability of the average procedural cop show or situation comedy. Having had these concepts and scenarios up in the air this whole time while still delivering interesting and relatively coherent drama (we see things happen to people, and can usually place them in time, we just never know why anything happens) remains the show’s greatest quality. I’ll say to this day that the Season 3 finale is as good of a two-hour television show (not movie or special, but episode in a series) as I have ever seen.

The show returns on February 2, and in advance of this ABC re-aired last year’s finale, with clues running underneath the episode’s action, to bring everyone up to speed.

Imagine that: a show airing its own simultaneous Cliff’s Notes.

The “help” generally proved more distracting than anything else, but it brought to light a point that is cause for some trepidation among the Lost faithful: there’s a whole heaping pile of shit that this show has to sort through in its upcoming final season, and eighteen episodes with which to do it. That’s more episodes than aired in either of the last two seasons (in order of episodes by season, 1-5: 24, 23, 22, 13, and 16), but the questions I asked above in this piece concern only the island itself. There’s still a cast of twenty characters or so to sort out, as well as those patented metaphysical pretensions to drop on us, and a filtering, not unlike the Final Judgment, of those who get to live, those who die, and who, if anyone, gets to hang out on the Edenic island into the future.

Supposedly the show’s creators have had an outline working this whole time (I’m not sure that explains the discrepancy in episodes per season, but okay) and have stayed true to their original timeframe, everything happening organically, with as little as possible contrived for time (for instance, none of the early episodes detailing character’s back stories were unnecessary) and an ultimate purpose all along towards which the show is barreling at warp speed.

It’s very hard to believe them when they say this. However, I will definitely be watching, both because I need to find out what happens (as a writer, I’m interested in finding out how they are going to bring this sprawling, multidimensional, not-space-time-continuum-contingent show to a close) and, more morbidly than anything else, I want to see if the people behind Lost can keep so many storytelling balls, of different sizes and weights, in the air without dropping anything, without screwing up, and finish their trick with a final, blessed flourish that brings the crowd to its feet with explosive applause.

They came dangerously close to blowing this whole thing last season. Every episode in Season 6 has to count. Eighteen is not a great deal of them, and there’s so much they have left to explain. Or maybe they’ll explain nothing, instead bringing the action to a conclusion but revealing little more than absolutely necessary to finish the story, allowing fans to battle it out on Internet message boards for the rest of eternity while the show’s creators sip wine on the French Riviera and laugh themselves to sleep at night on a bed full of money.

That would be a fitting end for this particular series.  It would also be infuriating.