LOST Loses Its Audience By Time Traveling Confusion

I still enjoy LOST. Is there any other show currently running with as convoluted and complex a plot? But, as much as I like it, I can understand why the show is hemorrhaging viewers.

I mean, I'm all for suspending disbelief when need be to enjoy a good story. I've no problem with the incredible level of disbelief suspension required to watch 24.

But, LOST really pushes it.

I'll just use part of the current plot line to show why people have bailed.

We saw John Locke get off the island during a series of island time travel hiccups. We saw Ben Linus kill John Locke. We saw a convoluted, Ben Linus engineered, return to the island involving the voodoo mother of one of the Widmore people back on the island that had all the escaped castaways back on a plane, once more, piloted, by the same pilot who helicoptered them off the island.

The island once more pulls a plane off course. It crashes. Now here is where the audience starts to get antsy. Sun, Ben Linus, the pilot and a lot of the other people, on the plane, crash in the present moment. But Jack, Kate and Hurley, on the same plane, crash sometime back in the late 1970s, they are back in time where the Dharma Initiative is still in full swing.

Then, Jin, shows up in a Dharma VW Van, amazed to see his former island mates. In a touching reunion Sawyer shows up. Hurley gives him a big hug. Sawyer, Juliet and Jin have been living with the Dharma people, as one of them, for 3 years!

Then Jack, Kate and Hurley somehow also join in. Eventually, somehow Sajid shows up, totally confused by it all. He's kept a captive with the Dharma people thinking he's an Other, with his friends unable to fix it. Eventually Ben helps Sajid escape, after which Sajid shoots the little kid version of Ben. Saying he was a bad man who needed to die.

Has Sayid been paying no attention? How can he think he could kill the little kid version of Ben. Meanwhile the Ghost Whisperer guy from Widmore's crew, who also now works for Dharma, had a funny conversation with Hurley explaining the logic of them not really being there due to that time shifting thing. It got very convoluted as Hurley tried to understand and then confounded the Widmore Ghost Whisperer by asking why Ben did not recognize Sajid all those years later when Sajid tortured him, after all, Sajid had shot him, one would think Ben would remember. The Ghost Whisperer said he'd need to think on that.

And then in the latest episode, John Locke is now back out of the coffin, totally alive, with Ben on a judgment quest with the Smoke Monster. After a lot of MYST like machinery tweaking Ben was face to face, so to speak, with the Smoke Monster, who flashed Ben memories in front of him, including the killing of his daughter. Apparently the Smoke Monster was satisfied with Ben's reactions and did not kill him.

I am not sure, but I think the latest episode established Ben as a good guy and John Locke now in control.

See why people bail? It's exhausting just to remember and type a little bit of the plot.