A conversation with Michael Emerson can sometimes be just as confusing and labyrinthine as Lost itself, but there’s one thing he told us recently that couldn’t be clearer. According to him, “This season is maxing out the degree of complication and movement that the show has been moving toward since day one.” So does that mean tonight’s premiere and the episodes that follow it will require even more copious note-taking just to make sense of them? Not quite, since even though Emerson mentioned “new notions of a time-space framework,” he promised that all this “will lead us to the final solution.” There are also, apparently, going to be some rewards for loyal viewers of the show. In addition to the expected batch of newbies, characters from seasons past will reappear in new and important ways. “They’re going to loop back and pick up on things that didn’t seem that important two years ago,” said Emerson, “but now they’re a big deal.” It sounds like the kind of stuff we’ve been dreaming about since season two. Does the world of Lost ever infiltrate Emerson’s dreams? “No, I’ve never had them … Well, I had a dream the other night and Josh Holloway was in it,” he said, then added cryptically, “But he wasn’t Sawyer — he was Josh Holloway.”
