Fantastic Four

What happens when an anthropologist, a drunk, a head case and a ghostbuster crash-land on a not so deserted island?

No, this isn't the premise of a so-bad-it's-good reality show where producers throw together a motley crew of characters and see what happens next. And neither is it some wacky remake of the Breakfast Club where high school is swapped for sandy beaches and leafy jungles and the biggest enemy isn't a principal in Barry Manilow's clothing but a monster shrouded in smoke.

No, this is what happened in the second episode of Lost's mindbending oh-my-God inducing fourth season.

And that was just the start of it.
But a lack of time and brain cells leaves me unable to untwist and lay flat to dry for you the recent clues to the island's mysteries. All I can say is this: don't think of time as a straight line, but as a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. Or something like that.

I can, however, tell you that Charlotte (the anthropologist), Frank (the drunk), Daniel (the head case) and Miles (the ghostbuster) are some of the most compelling yet puzzling characters ever to be introduced on the show.

What makes them interesting, you ask?
Well, they were assembled by a dodgy man in a suit named Matthew Abaddon to stage some sort of intervention (read: hostile takeover) of head Other Ben Linus.

Add to that their knowledge of the survival of the passengers of Flight 815, despite the fact that to the outside world they are dead at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Figure in their leader Naomi, who, after being knifed by the island's It Boy John Locke, used her last breath to covertly tell her teammates that they weren't in Kansas anymore.

But what's most important is what we know about the characters themselves:

On an archeological dig in the desert, Charlotte finds the skeleton of a polar bear
curiously wearing a Dharma Initiative collar.



Frank, now a spitting image of a drunken Nick Nolte, was once a pilot for Oceanic Airlines and was supposed to be behind the wheel of Flight 815.



Miles uses his six sense to finagle money from dead people. And it's not only on the dead he works his magic. Oh no. He's also blackmailing a very alive Ben Linus out of 3.2 million dollars.



But my favorite of the bunch is bumbling physicist Daniel,who, after a series of experiments involving electromagnetism and a rat named Eloise, might just possess the answer to that old age question: is time travel possible?



Whatever the final answer might be, I know these new characters, along with the original group of island misfits, will make the crazy journey that is Lost worthwhile.