Take your seats, class: We love Doc Jensen's 'Lost' course so much that we're extending it on to next week, week 5 of EW University. Check out our gallery of 15 Must-Answer 'Lost' Mysteries, or jump ahead and test your knowledge with our final exam on season 5, but definitely look for part 2 of his diary of a super fan on Monday. Stick around all summer long for future EW University courses on Quentin Tarantino and more.

'Lost': The evolution of a super fan
About the same time that I was truly beginning to lose my mind over Lost, many viewers were beginning to lose their patience with the show — perhaps, in part, due to the discouraging example of nuts such as myself. Whereas fans like me enjoyed this kind of gamesmanship and the attention to detail (and facility with Wikipedia) that it seemed to require, other viewers were becoming convinced that Lost was just toying with them — and they didn’t like it. The arc of John Locke may have ironically spoke for these alienated fans. In season 1, he was the Island’s man of adventure, the embodiment of the joy of discovery. But in season 2, he spent less time outside and more time locked up in the Hatch, confined within its fabricated reality, being slowly, surely manipulated by a silver-tongued liar named Henry Gale, aka Benjamin Linus. This was the complaint of Lost at the time, as well: a show that was losing sight of its core strengths, that was losing its way.

So began the dark days. Season 3 — written to and hampered by a well-intentioned by ultimately misguided scheduling strategy (six consecutive episodes in the fall; a two-month break; 16 consecutive weeks in the spring) — got off to a sluggish start with stories that scattered the characters across The Island and kept its iconic stars trapped in literal cages; both gambits robbed the show of its enjoyable group dynamics. There were more deceptions, more cons, more schemes within master plans — it all added up to an overload of ambiguity that played to the worst fear of the audience and critics: that the producers really didn’t know what they were doing, after all. Even for diehards such as myself, it was becoming increasingly hard to defend — especially after the Bai Ling episode, “Stranger In A Strange Land.” Ugh.

And then, two things happened that changed Lost — and my fandom — forever.

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