Tonight’s the season three kickoff of LOST, and I’m of two minds about watching it.  I was with the show from the beginning — I don’t watch a lot of television, but the premise was intriguing and different enough from what had come before that I gave it a shot, and loved it from minute one.  As the first season progressed, there was just enough of everything to keep me interested, a fine balance of mysteries and character chemistry and backstory.

Season two was just as good, though it felt in places like it was already tempting the slippery slope paved previously by The X-Files. I understand viewer psychology enough to know that it’s the mysteries that keep people coming back for more; if you reveal too much, you risk losing the audience.  On a parallel note, if you give an answer to a long-running question — any answer — someoneis going to be unhappy with it and feel let down.

But season two felt like it was laboring under the wait of all the new mysteries and twists, while getting little relief from answers to the old.  We found out what was in the hatch, and — well enough — the answer to that question simply opened up a new basket of questions. That’s fair enough, and good writing, to boot.

Still, as we head into tonight, I feel like I’m about to stick my hand back into what has become an ever-growing Gordian Knot of venomous snakes that have wound themselves perhaps painfully close into something that can never be unraveled to anyone’s satisfaction.

I remember reading early on that the writers had a master plan, an ending to the whole story, and I love that idea — a self-contained, finite story.  I’m reminded of comics like Sandman, Transmetropolitan, and Y: The Last Man.

Leave ’em wanting more instead of wearing out your welcome.

Not that there’s anything wrong with shows running forever.  But those shows — CSI, Scrubs, M*A*S*H, to list a few that fit this bill — are situational narratives.  The plotline of the show, the pitch, is a framework that is used to set up standalone stories.  Within these stories, you might have long-term arcs develop — a serial killer that crosse seasons, for instance, or the marriage between Turk and Carla — but the framework is unlimited (in theory).  The pitch for LOST, though, is a singular story, that without a decided finity simply opens the door to being painted into a corner.

X-Files, coincidentally, could have never become the distasteful memory that it is in my head, had Carter avoided the overarching mystery of the aliens (and the miasmic collapse that came with the Man Behind The Curtain).  The self-contained episodes were, by and large, wonderful, sort of a fictionalized Ripley’s Believe it or Not, driven by the chemistry between Scully/Anderson and Mulder/Duchovny.

Here’s hoping that the minds behind LOST stick to their original plans to have the show aimed at a final destination, and that they don’t let network executives steer them away from that ending. And that maybe, just maybe, these first episodes of the new season will offer some resoution to past wonderings before introducing a passel of new ones.  There’s only so many plot threads that I can juggle before I decide to see what’s on at 8 PM on Wednesdays on NBC.  Or just go back to whatever book I’m buried in at the moment…