Is "Lost" Lost?

First, a disclaimer: I feel terrible. I got nothing done at work yesterday and I didn't even bother to go in today because my mind is wandering. It's as if my mind is like "Shoot, B., you are a snot-filled, fevered mess. Why the fuck would I hang out here?" and took off for more interesting territory. The more interesting territory? This season of Lost. Here's why I'm hating it. I sat through many seasons of The X-Files, believing, like a chump, that Chris Carter had some master plan, that there actually was a real mythology to the show that someone--oh, this is wacky, maybe Mr. Carter--knew and that would slowly over the course of the series be revealed to the audience and then sastifactoraly resolved. At some point, I realized that was not the case, that Carter was just making shit up as he went along and that such shit often made no sense, as if the man had not been watching his own show for as long as the rest of us. That sucked. But it took a long time. Y'all, I'm not convinced, after viewing the first few shows of Lost this season that the writers aren't already just pulling shit out of their asses. Let's take last week's episode, which was resolved in such a way that it appears now that many of the main characters of the show will have to sit in a small room and press a button every hour or so. Fine, I guess. Stupid, but fine. Here's the problem, though. I realized, I was not looking forward to seeing last night's episode to how the characters get out of this dilemma; I'm watching to see whether the writers can write themselves out of this. Can they make it continually exciting or is this a very lame excuse to "keep those guys busy" while the show focuses on some other folks? The folks over at Television Without Pity remain excited and intrigued. The Butcher remains enthralled. But I'm starting to get suspicious. First there was the fact that the first two episodes were exactly the same and then there's the flashbacks to characters we've already seen flashbacks of that don't really deepen our understanding of them. Locke last week I could almost forgive, in that we got to see that he's got some issues that haven't exactly been spelled out before. And it could be that, with Hugo this week, there's something in that stuff that I'll look back on in five weeks and say "aha, so that makes sense," but I'm not feeling it now. Everything we saw last night, I could have already guessed based on how well they've established that character. Which, as a side note, also pisses me off. Either trust your viewers to pick up on the nuances of your well-developed characters--like Hugo--or don't bother putting the nuances in there. Just beat us over the head with stuff continually. Anyway, last season there were episodes in which not a lot happened, but it felt right, that things were being drawn out slowly because the characters were slowly figuring out where they stood and what brought them to this place. But this season? The slowness feels a little like the writers stalling for time.