First Lost Season Five News!

Well, it’s time to start getting excited. Not only do we now have our first official preview for Season Five of Lost, we also know when it returns!

According to the Hollywood Reporter:

"Lost" is coming back, and sooner than you might think.

Sources say ABC is scheduling a two-hour premiere for the fifth season debut of the Emmy-winning thriller on Wednesday, Jan. 21. The premiere will be preceded by a one-hour clip show (so three hours of "Lost" total).

That means "Lost" is returning to its Wednesday-at-9 p.m. time period. The most recent fourth season aired on Thursdays -- first at 9 p.m., then shifting to 10 p.m. after "Grey's Anatomy" returned to air following the writers strike. The new premiere date is also slightly earlier than last season.

ABC has lined up 17 episodes for 2009, which is one hour more than the show's now-standard 16-episode tally. The network added an extra hour to compensate for last year, which was cut short due to the strike. Also, yesterday THR reported that Reiko Aylesworth is in negotiations for a major recurring role on the show.

The recently picked up "Private Practice" is currently in the same slot and there's no word yet where it will go once "Lost" returns.

This is fantastic news for me.

Lost moving back to the TV night wasteland of Wednesday, instead of being yet-another good show on Thursday night!

Lost airing at 9:00 pm instead of 10:00 pm, so I’m not falling asleep by the last act!

Plenty of time to analyze and discuss before the weekend!

Also, did you catch the line in there about Reiko Aylesworth (aka - Michelle Dessler) pulling a Jin and jumping from 24 to Lost? Awesome!

I’m a little skeptical about two new hours of Lost actually airing on the 21st. With only 17 to air for the season, I would think they’d try to stretch them out as much as possible – and maybe there is some confusion that the “two hour event” actually just means the recap episode, and one new episode. If they were to air one episode each week starting on January 21st, it would put the Season Finale on May 13th – a little early. If they were to air two new episodes on January 21st, it would put the Season Finale on May 6th – which seems really early. And that doesn’t even consider the potential for the Season Finale to be a two-hour event, as it has been in years’ past.

Lastly, there is also word that the following are the episode titles for the first six episodes of Season Five. I’m pretty sure we decided that episode titles aren’t spoilers since they appear in TV Guide and stuff well in advance of the show airing, plus they’re fun to try and decipher ahead of time. But if you don’t want to know, stop reading here!

5.1 - Because You Left
5.2 - The Lie
5.3 - Jughead
5.4 -The Little Prince
5.5 - This Place is Death
5.6 - The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham

Based on this, I’m going with the following guesses for the centricity of the season premiere:

Juliet or Jack.

Smart money would be on the season premiere picking up right where last season finale’s left off – with Ben explaining to Jack what happened “because he left”. However, this would go against the Lost tradition of starting each season with the viewer completely confused as to when and where they are, or what is going on.

If they want to keep that trend alive, a Juliet-centric outing would be a nice start to the season, as we could see what the heck was happening on the Island “because they left”. This also calls into question exactly when and where the storylines for next season will take place. Obviously the Oceanic Six are currently in “present day”, and will continue forward from there. But for those on the Island, we have no idea what has happened to them from the moment the Island vanished to the time when Locke tried to recruit the Oceanic Six to come back to the Island. In my mind, there are two options for how the Island portions of the season could be shown:

1. They take place in the same timeline as the Oceanic Six. This would allow for that “what the heck is going on?” moment for the premiere, where we see a very different life on the Island than when we last left – because a lot of bad stuff has gone down since the Oceanic Six left. This would mean that the story of the previous two years on the Island would have to be told in Flashback form – or referenced but never shown.

2. The take place starting from the moment the Oceanic Six left the Island. This scenario would setup a much better payoff later in the season, when the Oceanic Six (presumably) return to the Island and see the “very bad things” for the first time at the same time the viewers do. This would mean the Island scenes for the season would show the start of things going very badly, but I’m still guessing there would be a “gap” in time that the viewers don’t see before all the characters reunite in what we term “present time”.

I think either scenario could work quite well.

A few other random thoughts on the episode titles:

- I’ve already looked, and “Jughead” doesn’t seem to be a clear reference to any book / movie / song. All you find is hits on Archie comics and some weird search engine.

- Could “The Little Price” be referring to Aaron? Or is that waaaaaaaay too obvious?

- “This Place is Death” is a strong candidate for an Island-centric episode, but I’m hoping we get some on-Island action before the 5th episode of the season.

- “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” is almost certainly Locke-centric, and will probably be one of the greatest episodes of the season (since Locke episodes usually are), and will probably show us exactly what happened from the point Locke left the Island to the point he died… which will probably answer a LOT of questions.

Okay, that’s all for now.

Discuss!