SOURCE: Real Life Comics (7:59 AM)

SOURCE: Joe Loves Crappy Movies (7:56 AM)

Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell and Naveen Andrews are both trying to fit comfortably inside a phone booth when their TV Guide photo shoot suddenly takes a playful turn. The actress - the show's Other-worldly Juliet - wraps one leg around her costar, exposing a long stretch of skin through the slit in her show-stopping black gown. "I'd like to have a gun strapped to my leg," she says with a giggle. "Or a nice, shiny Hitchcock knife."

Mitchell could be channeling a heightened version of her character. In the March 6 episode, Juliet is armed when she's instructed to kill for Others ringleader Ben - a job we also saw Andrews' Sayid tasked with in a flash-forward. Such twists are all part of Lost's creatively recharged Season 4. Not since Year 1 has ABC's Emmy-winning drama been this consistently thrilling. The flash-forward odyssey of the Oceanic Six - the survivors who made it off the island and back to the future - has infused the series with renewed urgency and richer emotional resonance. "It's heartbreaking to see these characters we love so hopeful [about] getting rescued," Mitchell says, "because we've seen that things after the fact haven't turned out so well."

That's an understatement. Besides sleek-suited assassin Sayid, Hurley's back in the loony bin, Jack's a suicidal pill-popper, and Kate's playing mommy to Claire's kid, Aaron. (That can't mean good things for Claire.)

According to executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Lost rediscovered its focus when they secured a 2010 series-end date. "Working that out," Cuse says, "was immensely liberating." With that target in sight, the duo finally felt they could make like a Camaro-driving Hurley in this season's premiere and put the proverbial pedal to the metal. These days, when it comes to mapping out plot twists, Lindelof says bluntly, "We're no longer stalling."

Especially since returning to work in February after the writers' strike. The producers' first order of business was to condense what were supposed to be the season's final eight episodes into what Lindelof calls a "lean, mean" five. Those installments begin airing April 24 (in a new post-Grey's Anatomy time slot at 10 pm) and will reveal, among other tasty morsels, why in the future, Sayid is working for Ben and Jack is oh-so-tormented. "It's no shock to say this season ends with the Oceanic Six getting off the island," Lindelof says. "The real mystery is how, and what they have to sacrifice and what happens to the people who didn't leave. You get all that this year." We'll take it.

Read the full story at TVGuide.com. (10:58 PM)

Actor Terry O'Quinn is in an elite circle. Not just because millions of people tune in each week to see him on the hit ABC television series LOST, but because he can call himself that rare honor - a working actor.

"Work. Work when you can, any way you can," said O'Quinn, sharing his insights on the acting profession to a room full of theatre students at Illinois Wesleyan University on Tuesday. The actor addressed three classes and an open forum Monday and Tuesday before returning to Hawaii to resume filming of the television show.

O'Quinn is the older brother of Illinois Wesleyan's Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Thomas Quinn, and offered to speak to his brother's theatre classes during a visit. "His wife's family lives on the East Coast, so he's flying back and forth all the time," said Quinn. "The trick was just getting him to land."

Sitting in a circle with nearly two dozen students in the E. Melba Johnson Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre, O'Quinn fielded questions and gave honest answers about everything from entering the acting profession, to working for television verses theatre, and being recognized.

"You know you are getting more famous when people say your name or even your character, 'Are you Terry O'Quinn?' or 'Are you John Locke?'" said O'Quinn, who had to change his name because another actor already has his name, Terrance Quinn, registered with Actors Equity. "I used to get people coming up to me and saying, 'You look familiar. Do you shop at Wal Mart?'" For O'Quinn, the recognition is not the reward of acting. "Really, I think of fame as distracting, it's something you have to get around," he said....

Read the full story at Illinois Wesleyan News. (10:54 PM)

Dr. Juliet Burke reveals herself to be a complex character on "Lost."

Or, rather, she reveals very little of herself. She is a combination of strength, cunning and wistful victimhood, all displayed on a face so enigmatic she could give the Mona Lisa a run for her money.

Introduced as one of the Others at the start of last season, Juliet has remained an object of delicious mystery, despite selective details parceled out by the show. Viewers still aren't sure where her loyalties lie - or even if they should dare to like her.

The only certainty: Elizabeth Mitchell does a bang-up job with the role, keeping viewers teased at arm's length even while drawing them in.

"I've had a tremendous amount of freedom to create something strange," Mitchell says happily.

Questions will probably multiply with Thursday's episode (9 p.m. EST on ABC), which is expected to give Juliet the spotlight.

Mitchell's rule of thumb in playing her: Don't act angry.

"She needed to be someone who could be a tremendous leader, who had an innate sense of power, but didn't behave in an angry or strident way," Mitchell says. "She needed to have a sense of toughness, but in a way the audience couldn't quite grasp....

Read the full story at MSNBC. (8:39 PM)

You're a Lost fan. You've watched every episode. Scrutinized the supplemental material on the DVDs. Read Bad Twin. And the novelizations. Played through the ''Lost Experience'' and gobbled up the mobisodes on ABC.com. Now what? Lost completists - and, we caution, only them - might want to answer the call of Lost: Via Domus, a new game that bears the name of the TV series but is conspicuously lacking in its inventive soul. As Elliott Maslow, a heretofore unseen passenger of Oceanic Flight 815, you find yourself marooned on the mysterious island with no memory of who you are. Through a series of awkwardly presented flashbacks, puzzles, and interactions with some of the show's established characters, Elliott must cure his amnesia and find his way off the island. (Via domus, as the game reminds us 1,000 times, is Latin for ''the way home'').

Lost-ies will probably get a kick out of doing things they could only previously imagine, like getting a closer look at the smoke monster, punching ''4-8-15-16-23-42'' into the vintage computer, intentionally walking through the fence o' death, and exploring the various Dharma Initiative stations. Of course, they'll be far less pleased with the truly horrendous voice impressions of some of their favorite characters: the vocal stand-ins for Locke and Sawyer are particularly cringe-inducing. Following the template of most Lost episodes, Via Domus lobs a tantalizing plot grenade at you during its last few moments. We won't spoil it for you, except to say this: while it by no means provides any sense of closure, it does address a theme currently raising a ton of questions midway through this season. Indeed, it's here when the game most closely resembles the show - we were told that executive producer Damon Lindelof came up with this twist - and when you wish the rest of the game didn't leave fans so...stranded. C

Read the full story at EW.com. (8:36 PM)

Watching the tense faces of actors carefully carrying dynamite made for several minutes of very exciting television in season one of ``Lost.'' Watching the back of an animated character carrying dynamite as you make him walk through the jungle in slow motion? Not so much. That's the fundamental problem of ``Lost: Via Domus,'' Ubisoft's new adaptation of the ABC series that hews so closely to its source material it never gives players anything remotely interesting to do. The only people bored enough to play through this tedious and poorly conceived videogame would have to be stranded on a remote island.

Serialized television has never translated well to videogames, but Ubisoft's Montreal development studio went to great pains to make ``Lost: Via Domus'' resemble its source material. Not only does the game look and sound just like the show, it's even divided into seven ``episodes,'' each of which starts with a ``previously on'' summary. The playable character, Elliott, is a new survivor of Oceanic 815 who, like everyone else on the island, has a dark past that's slowly revealed through flashbacks.

Immersing players in the world of ``Lost'' is one thing, but finding something compelling for them to do is a different matter. The series has a lot more talking than action, and the developers don't mess with that formula, which leaves not-so-exciting challenges like walking through a cave without letting a torch burn out, hiding behind trees from the black smoke, and following signs in a jungle. In several different instances players have to fix a circuit board by playing a minigame that's almost directly ripped off from ``Bioshock,'' right down to the sound effects.

``Lost's'' trademark flashbacks are as integral to the game as they are to the show, but the developers' weak attempt to turn them interactive is an exercise in frustration. Players have to make Elliott, who's a photojournalist, take a precise picture of something happening in the flashback in order to trigger the full memory. But the game demands that the shot be famed and focused in just the right way, which can lead to dozens of maddening attempts before, seemingly arbitrarily, the memory progresses.

There are only a handful of stabs at amping up the snail-like pace of ``Lost: Via Domus,'' which include a pair of running sequences and a gun that needs to be fired only five times in the entire game.

Not every videogame need be a nonstop adrenaline rush, of course. However, most that aren't replace action with multiple story paths and mental challenges. The plot of ``Lost: Via Domus'' - which sheds new light on the Hanso foundation and the Others and ends with a surprising twist - is just as intricate as an average episode, but it's short and completely linear. There are lots of visual and dialogue clues to pick up on, though, since Elliott's journal explicitly reminds players of everything important, and there's no real incentive to pay attention. The biggest intellectual tasks are a few SAT-like logic questions and a single puzzle tied to the name of the game.

That solution, like most of the information in the game, comes from conversations with Locke, Jack and the show's other main characters, only some of whom sound remotely like themselves. While they're all rendered realistically, the animation is so static that they never display a hint of emotion while talking. They look just as uninterested in the game as players will be.

Read the full story at Variety. (8:14 PM)

In the final minutes of "Six Feet Under" in 2005, the story sailed exhilaratingly ahead of us into the future, listing as it raced forward with all its characters on board. The sequence, TV's most epic epitaph ever, told the fates of each major character up to their deaths. After five seasons of gradual serial advancement, from A to B to C, "Six Feet Under" gunned it to Z.

That ultimate flash-forward is part of what ABC's "Lost," CBS' "How I Met Your Mother," NBC's "Heroes," and Fox's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" are now turning into a TV fine art: The future. These four serials are playing around with time like never before, shaking up TV's usually quite conventional storytelling by giving us something like A to B to X to Y to C.

While "24" and "In Treatment" try to evoke real time by moving forward minute by minute in the present tense, "Lost," "How I Met Your Mother," "Heroes," and "Sarah Connor" are jumping all over the sequencing map, adding a fantastic new scope to prime-time narrative mostly seen until now in niche and hard-core sci-fi productions. They're pulling the mainstream scripted medium into further realms of potential, beyond the predictable beginning-middle-ending structure.

Time scheming with the future is more commonly used in 20th century literature and the movies - think of the Kurt Vonnegut novel "Slaughterhouse-Five," in which a man becomes "unstuck in time," or the "Star Wars" movie prequels, which hinge entirely on what we know is going to happen later on. Indeed, fractured time frames have been in vogue at the movies for over a decade now, with the likes of "Pulp Fiction" and "Memento." Television shows, which exist in time and are works in progress over years, have shied away from future shock and end game. Most series go on indefinitely, an extended middle ("Law & Order" is now in its 18th season) with a cursory finale if the network permits. Once you've seen the denouement, according to typical TV wisdom, the rest is anticlimax. It's the soap opera aesthetic, which has defined TV shows since serial storytelling leapt from the radio to TV.

But "Lost," in particular, has put the lie to that more Victorian-novel-style thinking, showing us how the future can increase a serial's mystery. By giving us the end, the writers are free to focus on the intrigue of getting there - what led up to the peculiar positioning of the characters later on. The future outcome is built into the ongoing structure of the series, not just a tag at the end, as it was on "Will & Grace" when the sitcom ended with Will and Grace's kids romantically involved down the line....

Read the full story at The Boston Globe. (8:12 PM)

Billie Doux's review of "The Constant" is now up. An excerpt:

Desmond: "Eight years from now, I need to call you. And I can't call you if I don't have your number."

Okay, Sherman. Set the Wayback Machine to 2.342, and oscillate at eleven hertz.

So. Now we know. The "side effects" of the Island combined with the Hatch explosion made Desmond bounce back and forth in time like Billy Pilgrim alternating between Dresden and Tralfamador. It wasn't actual, physical travel because only his consciousness took the trip. Desmond remembered the present while in the past, but had amnesia in the present. I'm sooo confused. And what on earth does Daniel Faraday's pink hairdryer in 1996 have to do with the Island?

Read the full review here. (7:38 PM)

Sure, Jack Bauer could escape from the island in Lost in 24 hours. But what about the rest of us? Could you find your way back to civilisation if you were stranded with nothing but your N95 and a handful of conveniently prepared accessories and applications? Well, we’ve hatched a plan and how to be best prepared should the need arise. Read on for our ultimate N95 escape plan...

Read the full story at NokNok. (10:07 AM)

Ken Leung, who plays ghost whispered Miles Straume, will be onstage in a new play entitled "TBA," a world premiere by Carla Ching, directed by Denyse Owens, and co-starring Michi Barall.

Here's a synopsis of the show: When Silas Park's girlfriend leaves him, he becomes a shut-in, pumping out blistering autobiographical writings in his little East Village apartment. Just as Silas finds himself unexpectedly on the verge of literary stardom as the next Asian American wunderkind, his brother Finn shows up on his doorstep, accusing Silas of stealing his life. TBA is a play in two acts, in the crevice between fact and fiction.

It's part of ELEVEN, 11 new plays in a month-long celebration commemorating Second Generation's Eleventh Anniversary and the next generation of Asian American dramatic literature. Produced by Artistic Director Lloyd Suh, ELEVEN features 36 performances in 34 days, and incorporates over 40 artists in a program of world-class, world premiere productions.

The shows are at the Milagro Theater at the CSV Cultural Center, 107 Suffolk Street, New York, NY. "TBA" runs on March 11-April 5.

For more information on the show, read the article in TheaterMania. More information about this show and others featured in ELEVEN are at www.2g.org. (9:56 AM)

Those expecting the typical lame action game based on a hit TV show (see "Alias" or "24") will be surprised by Lost: Via Domus.

Ubisoft worked closely with the creators of the hit ABC show "Lost" to craft a classic adventure game filled with puzzles, answers to the show's rich mythology and an occasional action sequence. Designed for fans of the series, this game puts players in the middle of the action as Elliot, an original character who is a fellow survivor of the crash that stranded passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 on a mysterious island.

With amnesia from the crash, Elliot has his own story that unfolds through seven chapters of the game, which lasts about a dozen hours. Flashbacks, so vital to the show, are interactive in the game: Elliot can walk around in his memories (including a sequence aboard Flight 815 before it took off) and snap photos to unlock clues to his past. On the island, Elliot interacts with central characters from the show, including the survivors and the strange Others.

Although next-generation graphics bring each character to life, only six actors from the show provide voices. The voice-alikes are a mixed bag, and those that don't work can hamper your enjoyment.

Elliot's adventure takes players to locales familiar to fans, including the hatch and the survivors' beach camp, but also allow gamers to explore new areas. Mysteries will be solved along the way as the show's creators reveal new things about the first three seasons.

The challenging puzzles drive the narrative. The game features action and exploration elements, including a journey through dark caves and a frantic run from the dreaded black smoke. The look and feel of the series is enhanced by an original score from the show's composer, Michael Giacchino.

This is one game that lives up to fans' expectations.

Read the full story at The Washington Post. (9:35 AM)

Lost was last Thursday's most-watched scripted show, with approximately 12.85 million total viewers and ratings/share of 7.8/12.

Don't Forget the Lyrics benefited from its lead-in, American Idol, and actually beat Lost in total viewers (approx. 14.56 million viewers). However, Lost still had the advantage among viewers in the 18-49 demographic, beating Don't Forget the Lyrics (5.4/13 versus 5.2/13).

For more information, visit PIFeedback, Zap2It, and TV by the Numbers. (4:49 AM)