Warning:  This review contains spoilers.  Watch before you read.

The turnaround of "Lost" in season four was one of the few bright spots of network television in 2007. Season three had been a meandering disappointment until the finale, which turned the dynamic of the show on end by adding the twist of flashforwards into a not-quite-happy future.  Season four utilized this move into future time to up the tempo and the show's sense of purpose by moving the story along parallel tracks -- the escape from the island in the show's time and the quest to return in the show's future.

Though truncated the actor's strike, the fourth season nonetheless worked by expanding upon its core mythology, by positing new villains, and by having us rethink old foes. The best writing of the series concerned the ever-shifting character of Benjamin Linus (played with bug-eyed intensity by Michael Emerson), who transformed from outright villain into a plausible anti-hero, a Stalin fighting against the show's would-be Hitler.  (Ben is still Stalin, however:  he will liquidate his friends as well as his foes.)  The season ended with most of the core cast escaping from the island, though not without the apparent sacrifice of several supporting cast members as well as the mysterious death of John Locke.  And in what became the key quip of the finale, Ben moved the island.

Season five's opener begins with the reappearance of Dr. Marvin Candle in another one of the show's morning musical wakeup montages (the best remains Desmond's from season two). After feeding his wife's baby -- and begging the question of whether said baby was born on the island or not -- Candle turns to the task of recording another instruction film for the island's many research stations before being interrupted by his workers. It seems they're having trouble drilling through rock, and hand Dr. Candle a sonar image that shows the chamber Ben entered to move the island.  The workers suggest blasting through it, but Candle cautions that the site they're working at is home to an energy source that can be utilized to control space and time.  Thus, we are reminded of (or introduced to) a key plot point of season five -- time travel.

We then shift to where season four left off, with Jack signing on to Ben's plan to take everyone back to the island.  These scenes wrap up quickly enough, and then we move to those left behind the island, notably Locke, Kate, Sawyer, and Daniel the freaky scientist guy.  Locke is separated from the others, and it's through his eyes that we first understand that moving the island had the odd side-effect of shifting Locke through time, as he witnesses Eko's brother's plane crash in the jungle before getting shot by a not-dead Ethan. Then, flash, Locke and the other island survivors are shifted to a new time and place on the island. The time shifts move both forwards and backwards without a set rule; I had been expecting them to occur every 108 minutes, but no such luck.

Moving off the island, we follow Kate, Sun, Jack and Ben, and Hurley and Sayyid separately.  With Ben's help, Jack sobers up -- recall he spent most of season four's flashforwards getting drugged out of his skull -- and shaves.  As was the case in season four, Kate seems very content with her post-island life (if only because it means not running anymore), and she seems like the hardest sell to go back to the island, though outside forces may push her to do so.  Sun continues her subplot and her evolution into one of the show's (possible) villains by continuing her Devil's bargain with Charles Widmore to kill Ben Linus. (I truly hope that this is one plot that will be continued to a logical conclusion, and won't be forgotten or argued away easily by Jack.)  And then there's Hurley and Sayyid, whose pairing provides us with both comic relief and the lion's share of the action in episode one.  Hurley winds up driving a tranquilized-by-the-baddies Sayyid straight into an encounter with a "ghost" -- Ana-Lucia, who warns him to stay away from cops and passes on a hello from Libby.  How sweet.

(An aside:  the writers have always argued that the "Lost" universe relies on scientific rather than supernatural phenomena.  If they don't reasonably explain the "ghosts" Hurley encounters as well as Jack's dad and Jacob on the island, they're going to lose a lot of good will.)

Episode two opens with an argument on the island's beach among Kate, Sawyer and the other Flight 815 survivors about whether life has no meaning (or something like that).  One particularly annoying survivor starts bitching about how they can't even make a fire to cook food before taking a flaming arrow to the chest.  I admit it.  I laughed.  The survivors run across the beach away from the arrows in a scene that would be especially tense if we actually recognized any of them besides Sawyer and Julet.  Cut to the off-islanders.

Kate and Sun have a meeting that starts out warm but ends coldly.  Sun makes it known that she blames Kate and the others for Jin's death.  Fair enough, though if she's really out for revenge she'd not play that card so early.  Jumping over to Hurley and almost-corpse Sayyid, Hurley manages to get back to his dad and mom and sends his dad to find Jack to help Sayyid before spilling his guts out to his mom about everything that happened in seasons one through four.  Hurley's retelling of the past is, one supposes, a sly joke from the writers about how absurd the plot of the show really sounds.

Returning to the island, Sawyer and Juliet are nearly murdered by some paramilitary guys who look neither like the DHARMA people nor like the Others or like Widmore's group.  New plot point!  Their savior is Locke, who Rambos one of the guys with his survival knife and stands there looking like a 50-something badass.  Which Terry O'Quinn is.

Back on the mainland, Jack helps to revive Sayyid and Hurley has a meeting with Ben, which Hurley promptly exits on account of not-believing-anything-Ben-says-itis (a disease one can easily contract on the island) and is happily -- happily! -- arrested by the police outside his house.  Ben then goes to a church (or a university?) and has a meeting with Barbara Bush (er, Mrs. Hawking), who warns him of dire consequences if he doesn't retrieve the others in 70 hours.  But will we get a countdown on screen, "24"-style?

Overall, "Lost"'s return presents a new narrative device -- time travel -- without answering many questions.  The writers can now cleverly create flashbacks within flashbacks and flashfowards without flashforwards, or even flashforwards within flashbacks or vice-versa, but they haven't shown us what they intend to do with this power.  The first two episodes lack the punch of the new "Galactica" season opener, but "Lost" has more going for it than battle-worn shows like "24" and "Prison Break," which have long since lost nuance and characterization in favor of almost-constant cliffhangers.

I'll still be watching, but "Lost" will need a bit more coherence to keep the show enjoyable in the long run.

Ricky Gervais' "The Office" helped to spawn a whole new generation of squirm-comedy, a satirical subgenre which invites us to laugh at the delusions and absurdities of others.  The NBC adaptation of "The Office" may be the most high-profile entry in this family of comedy, but certainly the new HBO series "Flight of the Conchords" deserves a mention.

The brainchild of New Zealanders Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, "Conchords" stars McKenzie and Clement as their fictional selves, a folk musical duo trying to break into the big time in New York City, only to fall short of success.  In real life, the two stars are a comedy music duo, they put their talents to work in the series by offering up a number of hysterical parody songs that reflect the characters' inner thoughts.

The core conceit of "Conchords" is that Bret, Jemaine, and most of their friends are living in a prolonged adolescence that leaves them with a deficit of common sense.  For example, when one of the duo wants to have a date with a girl, the other insists on tagging along as a third wheel, oblivious to the inappropriateness of the situation.  The writers apparently loved this subplot so much that viewers have already seen it twice in the "Conchords"' brief series run.  Likewise, their Ricky Gervais-like manager Murray and their number one fan and stalker Mel demonstrate a similar level of disconnect from reality.

Humor abounds in "Conchords," but, as already noted, some of the gags repeat too often.  To balance things out the writers throw in absurd side jokes about the New Zealand-Australian rivalry (which is real), the discrimination felt by New Zealanders in the US (there's almost none, and that's the whole point of the joke), and girlfriend troubles.  These are good, but the show never degenerates into a sitcom-style string of unrelated jokes.  In the end, everything comes back to the friendship between man-boys Bret and Jemaine.

Overall, "Conchords" isn't as funny as "The Office," but it's a short and sweet summer diversion.  I'll keep watching and hoping the jokes don't overstay their welcome.

While outwardly two very different tales of brotherly love, "Supernatural" and "Prison Break" are at heart two shows that operate within the Buffy paradigm, the latter with its subject matter, and the former with its ironic and brooding atmosphere.  Unfortunately, both shows seem to lack the necessary energy to stay entertaining over the long haul.

Of the two, "Supernatural"'s appeal wears thin the fastest.  The basic story finds two twenty-something brothers making it their mission to travel across the US, vanquishing all manner of supernatural evil.  Each episode involves tackling a "case" of evil much as Mulder and Scully did with "The X-Files" of yore.

While beautifully shot and reasonably well-acted, "Supernatural" is crippled by holllow and derivative plotting, as if they writers think we won't mind the show liberally borrowing from "The X-Files," recent horror movies, and even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" itself.  As a result, there's little in the way of novetly to keep viewers coming back.  On the plus side, the show does sport a great soundtrack and a cool car.

"Prison Break" offers little supernatural appeal (pun not intended), but has all the slick packaging and biting dialogue of "Buffy" and "Angel" (no doubt having sometimes-Buffy scribe Marti Noxon as a producer has something to do with it) in a technically detailed, real-world setting.  In the show, a young man, Michael, goes to prison with a complicated plan to help his brother escape death row before being executed for a crime he didn't commit.

The "plan" gives the show the feeling of a technothriller, and there's a dash of the Dirty Dozen thrown in for good measure.  To break out, Michael must recruit a group of convicts to help him, and to the show's credit, many of the criminals Michael has to deal with are truly rotten individuals.  In addition, a major subplot involves lawyers seeking the truth about the murder Michael's brother was convicted of, and running lethal resistance from shadowy government officials.

"Prison Break"'s first season is nearly to a close, and it certainly has had some memorable moments, but the central conceit -- the prison escape -- falls victim to the central curse of television.  Sooner or later, the goal has to be reached, and the longer the goal is drawn out, the less interesting the show becomes.  Already, the "deadlines" of the story -- the brother's execution, the break out, etc. -- have been pushed back in an irritating way, leaving us with filler and flashbacks to occupy our time while we wait for the resolution.  Also, while the acting, set design, and cinematography is great, story elements have been stolen from other prison movies and series, such as Shawshank.  This is less of an irritation than "Supernatural"'s borrowing, however, since the cliches are rarely rubbed in the viewers' faces.  Among other things, the show avoids the worst of prison story cliches by presenting us with Warden Pope (played by Stacy Keach), who, in contrast to the typical sadistic warden we've seen in many movies and shows, is in fact an upstanding individual and has an interesting dynamic in his scenes with Michael.

Though I laid "Supernatural" to rest after just a few episodes, I'm still stickng with "Prison Break."  For how long, however, I can't say.