Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams, who has been dividing his time doing the Star Trek movie and his Fox series Fringe, still has a magic box filled with tricks that he bought as a kid and never opened.

"It's the idea of what's inside more than what's actually there that interests me," Abrams said during a recent conversation. "You can never make anything that is as good as what someone can imagine it can be."

You do realize, I say, that you are writing TV shows for people who would rip that box open in a heartbeat with their bare teeth just to find out what's inside, right?

"I never thought about it that way," Abrams confesses.

And that's why Lost often sucks.

People have been criticizing Lost ever since it came on the air in 2004, but only lately have die-hard fans begun to question their investment. While Abrams may be all about the journey, most of us want our questions answered at the end. And try to keep the jerking to a minimum. This season has all been about the time travel element, which hasn't gone quite as well as it could have. There are too many characters, too many storylines to keep straight in our minds. I need to drag out that map of characters that shows all the one to two degrees of Kevin Bacon separation between them all and prop it up like a finals cheat sheet.

Characters like Horace keep popping up from season to season, and now we have to connect the dots. News just leaked that a major cast member would be biting the sod before the end of the season. Do we have to re-chart?

Co-creator and producer Damon Lindelof once said that the show is all about redemption, and once a person has been redeemed, they die. Producers have also said the show wasn't about time travel -- until it was this season.

This has never been a series for the short attention span crowd. The twists and turns are like doing hard-core memory and imagination workouts. But have the producers totally lost the plot? I've forgiven the writers for the whole polar bear deal that lead me to speculate that the island was really just something trapped under a dome in the middle of a snow-covered landscape like the opening panels of Chapter XI of Watchmen.

No, it was just some critter who escaped from a Dharma zoo. And that four-toed statue shown in another episode? It was just a quick reference point to the fact that the island has been around for a long time. Smoke monster? An above-average security system.

The two men helming the Lost ship right now, Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, say these last two seasons are for the fans who have stuck with the show over the years.

Well, we're midway through the penultimate season, and I have to say this whole time travel theme has me crying whiplash. I like time travel as much as the next sci-fi fan, but you need to keep some sort of logic to it all.

Right now, there are at least 5 reasons why I'm lost this season:

5. Too many new characters.
Really? Isn't that why the red shirts got cut down by flaming arrows, so we could thin the herd a little and get back to basics? Instead, we've got to keep track of even more people. Getting out my handy chart now.

4. Ben kills Locke. Again.
How many times do we have to watch Ben kill Locke, only to have him be raised again from the dead for a higher purpose?

3. Jack suddenly gets cured of his addictions when he's on the island.
Maybe this plays into how Locke can walk and why Rose no longer has cancer? If this works Lindsay Lohan or Brit Brit might want to check it out.

2. When you exit the island without the aid of a submarine or other sea craft, you get spit into the Sahara desert close to Tunisia.
Charles Widmore says he got dumped out there after his ouster from the island. Ben Linus got transported there, and later John Locke went down the wishing well and into the desert. Wait! This reminds me of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. The character Charlotte S. Lewis is the writers' homage to C.S. Lewis. Charlotte died after getting a nosebleed indicating cerebral hemorrhaging. As a child, she was warned by Faraday when he was spinning through time to never return to the island. The island is death. OK, now my head is hurting and I feel a nosebleed coming on.

1. A donkey wheel turns the island into a time tunnel.
I'll buy a lot of snake oil from this crew, but when they came up with idea of a rickety wooden wheel that somehow can move the island through time, well, that's just kooky talk. And when Locke popped it back into place to stabilize the erratic time jumping, which was like something out of Slaughterhouse Five, well, it brought a whole new meaning to the term "jiggle the handle."

Readers react to "Why Lost Sucks This Season"

So I'm asking you all: What do you think were the best and worst of this season so far? Are you ready to move on, or are things just starting to heat up?

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