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THE NEW C.S. LEWIS Charlotte Staples Lewis (Rebecca Mader) has Doc Jensen up late reading books...as usual

MAGIC 8 BALL: LOST EDITION
It was Aristotle who said the following: ''Those who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions.'' To that end, we begin an occasionally recurring feature in which we weed out irrelevant lines of Lost inquiry, based on reliable intelligence obtained from trusted sources. Take it to the bank — and then watch the tellers look at you funny!

QUESTION: In the wake of the season premiere, ''The Beginning of the End,'' many fans wondered if a trail of Smokey smoke followed Matthew Abbaddon out the door of Hurley's mental institution. Should we be wondering if that was indeed the case?
MAGIC 8 BALL SAYS: YOUR ANSWER IS NO.

QUESTION: Also in the season premiere, Hurley looked through the cracked window of Jacob's shack and saw Christian Shephard in the rocking chair. Then, we saw an eyeball pop into Hurley's line of vision. Should we be wondering about the owner of said eyeball?
MAGIC 8 BALL SAYS: YOUR ANSWER IS YES.

QUESTION: QUESTION: In last week's episode, ''Confirmed Dead,'' we were introduced to a character named Charlotte Staples Lewis, clearly a nod to novelist, critic, and Christian apologist Clive Staples Lewis, aka C.S. Lewis. Should we be asking ''Does a specific C.S. Lewis book hold clues to the future plot developments in Lost?'' or ''Do Lost and C.S. Lewis merely share similar thematic concerns?''
MAGIC 8 BALL SAYS: EMBRACE THE SECOND QUESTION — BUT DON'T RULE OUT THE FIRST.

Some elaboration, if I may: In my recap of ''Confirmed Dead'' last week, I speculated that the C.S. Lewis reference was a nod to Prince Caspian and was meant to hint that Charlotte had been to the Island before. Another popular theory, voiced by leading Lost blogger Doc Arzt, is that Lost was pointing toward The Great Divorce, Lewis' allegory about the spiritual life, expressed via a fantastical depiction of Heaven and Hell. One point Lewis makes in that book is that for the redeemed, the experience of Heaven has begun here on Earth. I particularly like the metaphorical idea that the deeper you journey into Heaven (i.e., your own spiritual development), the more ''real'' you become, passing from spectral to solid form. Conversely, for the unredeemed, bogged down by earthly baggage they refuse to surrender, the experience of Hell has already started. ''Get busy living, or get busy frying,'' to paraphrase The Shawshank Redemption. But another neat Lewis touchstone for Lost is Miracles: How God Intervenes in Nature and Human Affairs, which examines the conflict between naturalistic and supernatural worldviews — a debate at the heart of Lost, too. The first sentence seems to tackle a major season 4 fixation head-on: ''In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost.''

Of course, whenever Lost drops a name like C.S. Lewis or the title of a book like The Turn of the Screw (another ghost story, by the way) — and whenever folks like me snap at the bait and go off the deep end with it — I get bombarded with messages of this sort: ''Do you really mean to tell me that I need to study all these references to understand Lost?''

The answer is ''No'' — and it comes from executive producer Carlton Cuse himself. ''I think the important themes we like run across all the Chronicles of Narnia books,'' says Cuse. ''And besides, no one should view it as a chore to read them.''

So why does Lost drop so many conspicuous references? For these reasons: to foreshadow future events, shade certain characters, suggest thematic interpretations, pay homage to creative inspirations...or simply for giggles. The biggest reason not to sweat the references too much is that they always require substantial hindsight in order for their meaning to be fully recognized. In the second season episode ''The Long Con,'' Locke found a copy of Ambrose Bierce's novella An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge. The intention, I was once told, was to hint at Hurley's hallucinatory loony-bin-friend episode, ''Dave,'' which aired five episodes (and two months) later.

More than anything, though, I think the writers of Lost like to name-check books as a way of tipping the hat to the writers and ideas that have inspired them in a general sense. (In addition to all the cleverly encoded Stephen King shout-outs, I'm told the inspiration for the idea that the Dharma Initiative was experimenting on dolphins at the Hydra station came from Douglas Adams' fourth book in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.)

That said, I'm still open to the possibility that reality on the Island is a supernatural manifestation of the castaways' collective, pop-soaked consciousness.

You know: kinda like EW.

NEXT PAGE: A cheat sheet for tonight's episode, and Doc Jensen's first Big Theory of the season


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