The show is so fantastic that I think most of us feel like it's happening as part of our lives. My question is about season 2. I'm trying to look ahead, and it's hard, but I'm really curious about how the second season is going to be. The first season seems to be a closed set, something that has a beginning, middle, and end that all come around and form a neat little world. My question is about what happens afterwards. I'm sure the second season will be about many new characters, and it's the brilliance of this show's initial conception to leave the thread of the survivors' characters and names unpulled for future usage. This way the writers can say "He/she's always been there, you just never saw him/her". The real trick will be explaining the character's dormancy.

A good idea would of course be to have all of the current regulars be as familiar with the newer characters as they are with each other, thus fueling the illusion that they've always been there and eventually solidifying it as a reality. The most effective means for most characters will be some sort of binding aspect to one of the Season 1 regulars. The easiest would of course be an injury, because this could establish Jack's relationship with that character all the way back to the day of the crash. Harder ones would be personal bonding moments and long friendships, but these would be the most intriguing. The point is: These characters will only be accepted by audiences if they are superimposed into Season 1, whether visually or implicitly. The visual superimpositions should be used sparingly but the implicit connections must be abundant. If the audience thinks of these characters solely as 'Season Two People' the reception is going to suffer. Some characters, however, will not need any connections and these will be the most mysterious characters.

Also, I'm looking forward to a 'character in a coma' set-up for season 2. It seems like the most perfect way to explain a character's unimportance (non-existence) to the first season and making him or her important for the second. To say that the character was in a coma, and that now he/she has woken up, is the best way to do this and I'm hoping for it.

Okay, so the real questions to the makers of the show are:

1) Are we going to see more flashbacks of current characters in the next season?

2) How many new characters do you think would be manageable, or have you already decided? If the latter, then how many?

3) Will new flashbacks of regular characters overturn the "surprises" of the previous flashbacks?

4) Will the show even follow the same format, or will it be made more like the pilot episodes, where flashbacks are random and somewhat of a wonderful novelty? (such as Charlie on the plane and what not)

5) Will we see more of the plane??????? I really, really miss the plane. The show is not letting me down so far, but I do see that it is detaching itself more and more from the reality of their situation: They are survivors of a plane crash. Michael's raft plan in "Special" was a great way to re-introduce the reason why they're all there and make it a reality again, and I am sooooooooo glad that the proper arguments were fleshed out. Michael had a noble, idealistically good idea. It just happened to be completely foolish and, considering the reasons for wanting to build the raft, it would be ultimately counter-intuitive. My question here is: Will we see the characters on the plane again? WIll we see more of the crash day? It's not ancient history, only if you let it be. A flashback to the crash wouldn't be like 'Oz's' constant flashbacks and plot-driven revisits to the 1997 riot (oy) if the crash is kept fresh in our minds.

6) Will the DVD of the first season include the 'Mega Version" of the show? The 'Mega Version' would be everyone's backstory told together as one really long movie, cross-cut with one another to create a suspensful montage of storylines, and then have the crash and everything afterwards. This would essentially be the chronological version of the story, although some minor disregard for chronology would have to be taken into effect for stories such as Sayid's, which takes place in its entirety years before the crash. In order to keep his story alive it would have to be cross-cut with events that do not take place at the same time. This version would obviously be for fans who have seen all the episodes and want to see the story in a new way. Any buyer of the DVD who hasn't seen the show would have to be strapped down by their friends (platonically, of course) and forced to watch the series in its entirety before they are allowed to watch this special feature. If they cheat, they should be burned. Well, no, the shouldn't. But it would be bad.

Please answer these as soon as you can. I'm dying to know these things. Thanks a lot for your time, and KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!

I realize some of the questions in the above post can probably be viewed as spoiler questions. I was looking through the guidelines and I see that some of my post may not be appropriate for answering. That's perfectly fine and I apologize in advance if it is indeed inappropriate and I'll use this judgement to filter my future posts.

The general questions were the ones I was most interested in. These are the ones about the general direction for Season 2 and basic concepts that surround the world of the show as a show with both a diegetic and a network-political future. Any questions that are either innappropriate or unanswerable because of potential spoilers do not (and should not) be answered, and I apologize once again.