It's lately been a dark time for TV. Out of the other shows I watch, Studio 60 and Veronica Mars are both tanking in terms of quality, and on Thursday nights I have a class that gets out too late for me to be able to watch The Office. And then while Lost was on its infinite hiatus, I kept reading all these articles about how the show has LOST quality or maybe it's LOST it's way, and while I appreciate puns a lot more than the next guy, this crap made me angry. The six-episodes-followed-by-a-break was an experiment, and it was an experiment that didn't quite pan out due to the fractured nature of the storyline at that point -- one episode on Other Island, one episode with Sun, Jin, and Sayid, one episode with Locke...and then whoops, we're just about done. But I kept telling everybody to hold their horses, because they'd be crapping their pants at the awesomeness of 16 back-to-back episodes when the show returned. If said episodes were any good, that is.

Guess what? The first one was awesome.

I don't want to jump the gun and say we're set for the rest of the season, but this was one darn fine solid hour of television last night. Let's review what makes a good episode of Lost great:

1. Solid answers that still leave the door open for more storytelling. Juliet's backstory was great, both the trademark twist-at-the-end-of-the-teaser -- hey look, it's Miami -- and the story of how she was recruited onto the island in the first place. Plus a reappearance of Ethan! Sweet.

2. Some teases on a few mysteries. Tom the Other started explaining something to Jack about "when the sky turned purple" when Ben's surgery interrupted them. Also, in The Brainwash Room -- Room #23, by the way -- one of the messages on the screen that Karl was being forced to watch mentioned Jacob -- presumably the same Jacob that Pickett mentioned last fall; in both instances the reference seemed like Jacob was someone higher up than Ben -- maybe the "real" leader of the Others, the Him that was mentioned in Season 2.

3. Action! Sawyer and Kate's mad dash through the woods, the Karl prison break-out (with the help of the "Wookie Prisoner Routine" as Sawyer mentioned), and Juliet's cold-blooded killing of Pickett. Sweet.

4. A Mean Girls reference. Well not exactly. And that's not exactly sound advice on how to make a good Lost episode. But when Juliet's ex-husband got hit by the bus -- totally called it, by the way -- all I could think of was Mean Girls. Is that sad?

5. Cool moments. The climax, in which Kate recites Jack's story to him, while Jack is faced with a similar situation at hand, and then he stitches Ben back up, and that Pensive-Lost-Theme-Music plays, that was just some solid writing.

6. A promise to return to form -- and by that I mean the story taking a decided path back toward the real island. Sawyer and Kate are going back. I have a feeling that should make a lot of people happy, and hey -- I've missed Hurley and Charlie and Claire, et al, too.

7. Random explanations that I shouldn't buy but totally do anyway. Ben wakes up during surgery? What? "Jack's a spinal surgeon, not an anesthesiologist," Tom tells Juliet. Oh. Okay, then.

One final note. I looked up the fast national ratings data and last night it's estimated that Lost averaged about 14.7 million viewers last night -- great for most TV shows, bad for Lost. (It's average during the first part of Season 3 was around 17 million, I believe.) I have a feeling a lot of people at ABC are very worried today. Mostly I think it's because of the disillusionment (and plain forgetfulness) a lot of people have had with the show over the past three months. But since tonight's episode was so strong, the word-of-mouth machine should theoretically start chugging along, and thanks to the no-more-repeats schedule and the newfound avoidance of American Idol, it stands a good chance to slowly climb up -- as opposed to Season 2, when the second half of the season found ratings going slowly down. It will be interesting to see how next Wednesday's episode fares.