By BRENDAN LOSINSKI

Staff Intern 

The popular television show “Lost” returned to the air this week. 

The season finale last May certainly left its fans on the edge of their seats, wondering about their favorite marooned plane crash survivors. 

Having finally found a way to contact a nearby ship and survived a showdown with “the Others” — the island’s mysterious inhabitants — it looked like the season finale was going to give the survivors of Flight Oceanic 815 a happy ending. 

But, it wouldn’t be “Lost” if it didn’t have a twist.

Last season ended with a dark vision of the future, where Jack (Matthew Fox), the leader of the survivors, was shown, after having escaped the island, as a shell of the man he once was, screaming pathetically about his obsession of returning to the island that he had worked so hard to escape. 

Then came months of silence.

During an eight-month hiatus, fans could only guess what would happen next. 

After spoilers of the finale appeared online, the show’s writers entered what they called “radio silence,” speaking to no one about the show. 

Thursday night, viewers finally got a chance to see what came next.

The season premiere featured a second flash-forward where another survivor, the good-humored Hurley (Jorge Garcia), had also escaped the island and is in pretty desperate shape. 

He has been sent to a mental institution after seeing things that couldn’t really be there. As he recalls the events back on the island, viewers quickly see that the would-be rescuers may not be who they say they are, and that leaving the island may have been a dire mistake.

The episode’s title, “The Beginning of the End,” is not only a turning point in the plot of the show, but also for the series as a whole. 

Last season its producers announced that “Lost” would have three more seasons, the first of which began last Thursday. 

 As a result of the Writer’s Guild strike, ABC will only be able to air the eight episodes that were completed before the strike began.

How long it could be before viewers will be able to see the end of the series is now anyone’s guess.

With this imminent drought of episodes, adding to the growing mysteries now shown both on and off the island, fans of “Lost” may soon be getting fairly desperate themselves.