So the smoke monster (not to be calling anybody any names), or Titus Welliver, or the devil, or whoever he is there inside of Locke's body, tells Ben that the poor real Locke was thinking "I don't understand" as Ben was choking the life out of him.

And Sayd, who was, like, totally dead, wakes up and asks, "What happened?"

Well, don't ask me. I just watch the stuff, and so did a big slug of Americans. Ratings for this season's premiere were up 22 percent from last season, and so what if twice as many people watched American Idol than the 12 million or so who caught up with Lost?

The 8 p.m. catch-up clip job did its work well, reminding me of some of the things I'd missed and making it crystal clear that the ongoing saga would be anything but crystal clear, going on now with two parallel stories, one in which the H-bomb in the well apparently worked after Juliette smacked it with a rock and the whole thing never happened, and the other in which our heroes are captive in a Mayan temple with a puzzlingly well-crafted oversized hourglass to keep track of its unorthodox spa treatments and a Japanese leader with a geek henchman who speaks for him because the boss says he doesn't like the taste of English on his tongue. I've been around this business for a while, and I never even contemplated writing such a sentence as the preceding one.

Three hours of Lost is about an hour and a half too much for me, so I think I'll skip the "enhanced" rerun next Tuesday at 8, in which the producers point out important clues to the faithful. Probably wouldn't help me anyway. But I'm liking the prominent role of our old mechanical friend, the VW bus, and who can't appreciate dialogue like this:

Jacob: "I died an hour ago."

Hurley: "Sorry, dude. That sucks."

Meanwhile, in the real world, there's terrible news: Evangiline Lilly told eonline.com she may never act again: "Acting is something I appreciate, and I think it's been an amazing experience. But I'm not passionate about acting the way you probably should be to call yourself an actor." 

Matthew Fox says he's quitting TV, too, but who cares about that?