Tons of new LOST goodies

It's been over two months now since the last post about Lost. But this week is seeing a nice torrent of info about what might be the best show on television right now. You might have already heard that Harold Perrineau will be returning as Michael next season. Which is bound to unloose all kinds of craziness, given the circumstances under which we last saw Michael.

Then there is Comic-Con in San Diego, running from Thursday to Sunday this week, and on Thursday night Lost producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof gave a presentation about the direction the show is headed. You can read reports from the panel here and here. Among the tidbits from Cuse and Lindelof ...

- Season Four will use both flashbacks and flash-forwards.

- Lost might be moving to Friday nights (my wife will be happy if that happens :-).

- Jack and Claire will come to know what we the viewers already know about them this coming season.

- We will see how Benjamin wound up in Danielle's net: Cuse says that it was an accident and that Ben was on his way somewhere when he was snagged.

- Getting off the island may not necessarily mean escaping the island: it's not "the end" by any stretch, the producers said.

- Michael will be returning as a regular character, not just a cameo or an appearance in a flashback.

- The enigmatic Richard Alpert, played by Nestor Carbonnel, may not see much screen time or any at all this coming season because of Carbonnel's upcoming CBS show Cane (not to mention that Carbonnel is also playing the mayor of Gotham City in a certain lil' film due out next summer) but I'm hearing a number of people saying that if Cane is cancelled early on, that we may yet see plenty of Richard. I sure hope so: by the end of Season Three, Richard was one of the most intriguing mysteries of this show.

- We haven't heard the last of Libby. We will get to find out her story.

- Ditto with Danielle, apparently.

- We will find out more about "the monster", which has been called Cerberus but might have other names also. We're going to find out who made it and what it's purpose is.

One last tantalizing bit of info from Comic-Con is a new DHARMA video that was shown to the crowd attending the panel, and it's probably best to go with The Tail Section's description of the footage 'cuz nothing I can do on this end would have this making a lick of sense:

The final item of the night was the video clip from Norvick, Norway. In this film we see the actor formerly known as Marvin Candle getting hair and makeup done on him in a new testing facility. Soon after he begins a speech for a new DHARMA station: The Orchid. He goes by the name Edward Hourwax and says that the Orchid is Station 6. It is not a botanical garden as they were told to tell their families when they left them to come work for DHARMA. Instead, it is another location on the island where unusual properties (this time from I believe I heard him say a volcano) were being used to form a kashmir effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_effect).

He proceeded to hold out a bunny which has a black 15 inscribed on his side (similar to the numbered bunnies of Ben's owning). From here things get weird. First the film jumps twice during the entirety, the first time the Jacob loves you line from the Karl video is seen for a split second and on the second jump a gorilla riding a bicycle is shown upside for a split second. During this time we hear the alarm noises usually associated with the 4 minute warning with the hatch. We then pan to another area of the room and see another bunny magically appeared on a high shelf... the thing is, this bunny has a number 15 on his side as well. Hence why I mentioned early the cloning properties of the hatch).

I'm not sure what all of those things in the video mean, but that's all I can remember from it.

It's actually spelled "Casimir effect" and it has to do with forces tied to quantum physics between objects at extremely close distances from each other. Though how a gorilla riding a bicycle figures into this, I haven't a clue.

Finally, a Quicktime trailer for the upcoming Lost: The Game has been released. Here's a still I pulled from it showing Hurley standing around the camp's "pantry" ...

This may be another reason to possibly invest in an Xbox 360 in the near future (or if they release it for the Wii, maybe you can use the controller to beat people up with Eko's "Jesus stick" :-P ).