Blame it on the polar bears. They’re the reason why I can’t commit to any of the usual theories of Lost.

Oh, it’s not that the theories are bad. I mean, there are times when you can almost convince me that the castaways are dead but they don’t know it. These people are obviously lost souls—all those unresolved past relationships, all those deaths (both premeditated and accidental) on their consciences. They could easily be in some kind of island purgatory, waiting at the karmic baggage claim for their redemption or damnation to come around. And my respect for the afterlife theory of Lost only increased with the opening of the hatch and the discovery of the wiggy Desmond living in a biosphere that once belonged to a scientific experiment called the Dharma Initiative. Is Desmond a figure of divinity, or a demon of the demimonde? And what about the enigmatic task—inputting Hurley’s numbers into a computer and hitting the Execute key every 108 minutes—that Desmond stuck the castaways with when he abandoned his post? That possibly meaningless button-pushing sure looks like another form of purgatory (or hell) to me, more punishment for our castaways as they float in the ether of eternity.

Then again, there are times when I am equally susceptible to the theory that the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 are alive and everything that is happening to them, however bizarre, is really happening. Remember, we are within the elastic boundaries of SF storytelling here. So the island could be, as the grainy Dharma Initiative “Orientation” film stated in the third episode of season two, a hot spot of electromagnetism, presumably  …