Get More Out of Lost by Visiting These Web Sites

Season 4 of Lost is coming to a close, and there are a lot of mysteries still waiting to be resolved. How will the Oceanic 6 leave the island? Why does Jack want to go back in the future? Why doesn't Kate? And how does anyone believe that she gave birth to Aaron? That doesn't even address the questions about Jacob telling Locke to move the island and Ben showing up in Tunisia. Some viewers have a little more insight into these questions than others, however.

If you don't know what may be in store when Locke takes the elevator down to the Orchid station, or you're surprised to see that Jack's dead father Christian is still hanging around the island, you probably haven't been tuned in to all of the ways you can connect with Lost outside of the weekly TV episodes. There is a whole other side to Lost that is out there waiting for you to discover it.

This isn't a guide to find spoilers that tell you every little thing that will happen a week or more before it hits the air. I avoid those myself. But there are a myriad of ways that you can find out more information, some of which the show's producers have put out just for the true core fans.

One site you should definitely check out is the official Lost site (lost.abc.com). The fact that you can watch any episode of Lost for free in streaming HD video should be enough to bring you here, but there's more. Be sure to check out Missing Pieces, a series of short episodes that were originally distributed through Verizon Wireless customers as a way to keep interest going between seasons 3 and 4. Now they are available for free on the official site. Few of them are hardly groundbreaking or required viewing, but some of them offer intriguing alternate viewpoints on events that happened in the first three seasons. The last one, though, is a complete mind-blower offering a startling new perspective on the very beginning of the series.

Another excellent feature of the official Web site is the official Lost podcasts. They are usually very coy about revealing any new information, but executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are always entertaining in a high school A/V club kind of way. And sometimes, when they feel it is necessary, Damon and Carlton will stop dodging fan questions long enough to clear up things that are becoming a little too troublesome to the fans. Be warned, though: the podcast is chock full of its own little in-jokes and it is sometimes hard to determine just when Darlton (as the fans have dubbed the pair) are being serious.

My favorite site personally is the Lost TV forums (losttv-forum.com). Originally dedicated solely to Lost, this message board now discusses a number of different TV shows and movies. The Lost discussions, though, are still top notch. You can find serious discussions of the physics behind wormholes, quirky debates about how long a person could last on an island with Hurley's mom, character worship and bashing, and everything in between. If there is anything to be known about Lost, you will learn it here, and often times before you can learn it anywhere else.

Another good site is the Lost encyclopedia, or Lostpedia (lostpedia.com), an exhaustively complete wiki about the show. It serves as a source of hard information, including up-to-date episode recaps and transcripts, and an island timeline that is so well researched that some consider it more definitive than statements on the show itself.

If you're looking for a picture of Kate and Juliet wrestling in the mud or Sawyer with his shirt off, you should check out the photo gallery at Lost Media (gallery.lost-media.com). The number of stills archived there is truly staggering. And if you ever get tired of looking at pictures your favorite characters, it's also a great piece to check on something you thought you saw in the background of a particular scene of your favorite episode.

These Web sites are just the tip of the Lost iceberg. There are far more sites dedicated to debating whether Kate will end up with Jack or Sawyer, or just how long Locke will let Ben lead him around by the nose. But the ones listed here are, I believe, the best places for a newbie to start expanding his or her horizon beyond the weekly episodes. The Internet is ready to pick up where television leaves off. Go see what it has to offer.