Lost, as a series, is the answer to the question Charlie asked at the end of the pilot episode. It is the answer both literally and figuratively: literally, because the series will in its 117 episodes serve to answer this dangling question of the nature of the new reality that the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 find themselves in; figuratively because the current - though not eventual - answer for all our characters is, more simply, "lost." And because of this, the true willpower behind the show is slowly becoming clear. Some of the initial mysteries of the series - the monster, the Others, the walking dead people - will likely be answered, and others likely will not, but either way, the slowly-assembling understanding of the series as a whole is also showing it to be astoundingly, and almost frighteningly, prescient science fiction for the America of this decade. Not the stomp-around-the-world-and-be-jerks America, mind; rather, the existential quagmire of the regular people just trying to get back to some sense of "home."

"Guys... where are we?" framed what could be called the "aggressive expansion" period of the Lost mythology. For about sixty episodes following the moment Charlie posed that question to his friends (and to the audience), enigmatic clues that both seemed to widen the poser and define its answer piled up on a nearly episode-by-episode basis. Smoke monster, walking Christian, Walt with the birds, whispers in the jungle, Others and Dharma, hatches and numbers, magnetic chambers and time travel, the "magic box" that can create anything, seeing the future and flashing to the past, a man who does not age walking out of the jungle to talk to a man in a wheelchair who can now stand on his own two feet, etc., etc., etc., all circulated into a kind of orgy of creative unburdening that - with The X Files firmly in mind - might well have been going nowhere.

Our gaze was forced, instead, upon the characters; endlessly, relentlessly, past the point of annoyance and almost to the point of giving up on the show altogether, while the mythology elements (seemingly) spun their wheels. Three long years of flashback after flashback after flashback - some with enormous twists and reveals at their center (Locke and that wheelchair, the Ballad of Rose and Bernard, and I am still quite fond of finding out the meaning of Jack's tattoos), others barely elevating above movie-of-the-week (anything involving Sawyer and a con; anything involving Hurley and anything). Here, though, was a kind of unseen point - not just, who are these people? What do they mean? But more importantly, are their lives before this (or after, in season 4) actually better than their lives now?

Charlie's question - "where are we?" - was tantalizingly extended in the third season, once all concerned were relatively certain that our heroes were not, in fact, stuck in Purgatory or some other godforsaken Miltonian or Manichean construct. Locke's father - whatever the fuck his name was - said to Sawyer, "If this isn't hell, friend, then where are we?" offering, without a moment of knowing it, an even more cogent statement of the series' mission than even Charlie had in season 1. By tacitly dismissing ("if this isn't hell") the inevitable American religious interpretation from the list of what-is-the-Island contenders, Seward/Sawyer/Cooper/Whateverthefuck likewise positioned the true question at the heart of not just the show, but the world: if we are neither in heaven nor heaven's dry run, what are our responsibilities to the now?

The positioning of the now - in and around flashbacks and flashforwards and flashpresents - makes it all the more plain that in Lost, Lindelof and Cuse (and to at least an initial extent, Abrams) have created the great pop mythology of this decade of American life. The series arrived in 2004 - at the end of the first term of the Bush administration, three years after 9/11; a cogent point in time where this decade could be said to have formally defined itself through issues of potential environmental catastrophe, brutally dangerous geo-political co-existence, and even the sort of shadow conspiracy mistrust of higher-ups that marked the 1990s great mythos, The X-Files. On Lost, American culture is world culture - the nods towards globalism in the principal cast (at first, two Koreans and, more importantly, an Iraqi) are still so America-centric that one need not even notice that there was, apparently, only a single Australian passenger on a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles. (Even she was just trying to get to the States.) Everyone is America-bound in Lost, but no one is there yet.

But this is no Purgatory, and just as surely, the forward action of the first several years of the show - Jack's rational, strong-willed efforts to do exactly what one would expect of a leader in such a situation, getting the castaways off the island - was shown to be a false god. Jack got off the island, all right, and just as quickly (to us, thanks to that now-glorious 3-year ellipse that takes place between the parallel narratives of the final episode of the third season, "Through the Looking Glass") realized he should never have left. It is an understanding that, it seems, will come upon all of the characters over the course of the series. For Rose and Bernard, or more importantly for John Locke, it arrives almost immediately; for Sawyer, it takes a day of capering with the boys in the Winnebago (or perhaps an excursion to 1977) to make him realize that he's exactly where he wants to be. The further the series goes along, the more plainly irrational the rational desire to leave the Island becomes: because even with smoke monsters and Jacob and Others and Dharma sharks, who wouldn't want to be there, on that island, in that palace of perfect Hi-Definition green? Who would want to leave?

And certainly not us, either; the pleasure principle of Lost has now abounded our relationship with the show and turned it over into pure cultural synthesis. I once categorized, and dismissed, Lost as little more than visceral, visual pornography in television form, pure pleasure with no soul; and while my view at that time was embarrassingly short-sighted, it also held an element of recategorized truth. The frenzy of the visible, or of visual pleasure, is Lost's onscreen metaphor for the deeper reality of the Island and its relationship to all the castaways. Observe the simple democratic variation between off-island sequences and on-island ones. Off the island, there is less colour, less camera movement, less vegetation, less intrigue. On the island, the entire world is a big bright day-glo Pandora's Box of awesome, exploding in every direction in frenzied, hyper-acute action cinema. I know which one I find more appealing.

Remember: are their lives before this, actually better than their lives now? If the castaways are all "lost," then by admissions such as the above, so are we. And so Lost both furnishes the escape - for the characters, the attempt to escape the Island; for us, the escape, Narnia-like, through a wardrobe and into a perfectly actualized otherspace that is as glorious a fantasy as we could ever hope to imagine - and the analysis of the fraudulence of that escape. Why is Jack clawing, scraping, grasping to breach the boundary wall - to break through that audible "woosh" - that separates the Island from the flashbacks/forwards/presents (where everything is so horribly ordinary and plain and concrete) when he could be here, at this moment, in the Paradise of the Now? Who would want to leave this place?

There are two moments of pure exaltation on the show, and both are bound in the simple pleasure of being in the place that you are, and enjoying what you have. The first is the "Wash Away" montage at the end of the third episode, and the second is the "Shambala" montage that closes "Tricia Tanaka is Dead." No threat of afterlife here - what peace can be found is found, as the precisely-chosen lyrics point out, on the road to Shambala.

If Charlie posed Lost's first question and Seward/Cooper/Locke's Daddy posed the second, I think someone, at some point, will pose some variation of that last line - "who would want to leave?" - as the third and final question; the grand, spiritual epiphany. I've spoken before about Desmond's "you have to lift it up." I think I'm beginning to know what that line means, for the Lostaways, and for the rest of us.