The American Spectator

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The real Richard Alpert, former Harvard partner to Timothy Leary, represents using modern science to achieve religious transcendence, and later, renaming himself Baba Ram Dass, going straight for the religious transcendence.

The character Alpert is seemingly ageless. If his name is meaningful, it could relate to the apparently religious mission of his group -- the "Others" -- compared to the almost parodically scientistic pre-crash Dharma Initiative that they seem to have superseded.

ALL SUCH SPECULATION is hazardous, however, since Lost almost asks not to be trusted. It loves season openings and closers deliberately designed to confuse the viewer as to what he's seeing, where and when.

Lost's constant use of the number "23" indicates a love for the fiction of Robert Anton Wilson. The philosophical science fiction novelist celebrated "guerrilla ontology" -- wild techniques to make people question the nature of the reality they are perceiving.

Despite all the political philosopher namedrops, Lost doesn't show much of a functioning society, and definitive answers, both narrative and philosophical, continue to slip away. Ultimately, the show sells classic sociopolitical anxiety: the world is mysterious and strange, with inexplicable forces that might save your soul or might kill you, and you'll never know why; scientific planners and religious fanatics alike have complicated plans in which they use humans as pawns; the wealthy and powerful pursue secret agendas that may either save or destroy us.

By naming characters after philosophers, Lost reminds us that the conflicts of ideology, power, and social relationship are timeless, perhaps "eternally recurring" -- like character Desmond Hume's re-cycling through his own life, like the seeming series of "powers" rising and falling on the island (from the creators of the 4-toed statue to the Black Rock crew to the "Hostiles" to Dharma to the "Others" to...?).

With its echoes of everything from Homer's The Odyssey to O'Brien's Third Policeman, Lost's intricate webs of meaning and suggestion make it not only an exciting example of post-modern referential bricolage, but also the most significant pop adventure tale of our time.

Even in a "state of nature" on the island, its flashback-strewn storytelling reminds us that none of us have a Lockean "blank slate." Our past choices, failures, sins and obsessions will always shadow and influence our present. Built the heart of the viewer's relation to the show's mysteries is a faith that its writers, our "leaders" -- the gods of the fictional universe we are watching -- are careful, caring, omniscient and omnipotent, that not a plot thread or mysterious reference is dangled that they won't ravel together with care.

We may be saps to believe it -- but Lost fans know that attitude makes experiencing the show more delicious.