Ashes to Ashes has consistently mystified, with episodes regularly grinding to a halt halfway through for some oddly unrevealing moments of characterisation (the end of last Thursday’s ep where Gene Hunt offers an apology seemed particularly pointless). Meanwhile, Torchwood infuriatingly continues to miss the mark. The whole thing seems compromised by a kids’ show premise sitting in an adult drama. You get the sense the production team is so confused by the series, they’ve lost any sense of what a good episode of Torchwood should look like. Series two hasn’t been completely crap, but it’s continued to underperform.

It’s Lost then, that I am turning to for my telefantasy kicks at the moment. This fourth series has been taut and adrenalized. The key moment for me occurred some weeks back when Jack asked Faraday to explain why he was running strange experiments on the island. The traditional prevarication then ensued, and I was left assuming that the answers Jack was looking for would be withheld for weeks on end. But just five minutes later, Faraday was outlining the whole theory regarding the island being caught up in some kind of time vortex thingy. What a relief to get some answers.

I’m not sure if the 60-odd hour investment in watching the first three series to start getting these kind of pay offs is entirely worth it, but the episode in which Desmond started jumping through time, was quite simply the best slice of telefantasy I’ve seen since ‘Blink’, and remarkably complex and high-concept for a mainstream TV series.

Completely unrelated, but a quick nod of appreciation too for Virgin 1′s American Inventor.

With Heroes finally debuting in the UK last week (albeit on the Sci-Fi) channel, it was apposite that Sunday’s episode ofLost managed to significantly freshen up that series’ rather, by now bedraggled story arc. Being one of the seemingly few stragglers in the UK who still maintain a relationship with the series since it moved to Sky, it felt a little like payback time.

In a nutshell Desmond, the mad Scottish bloke who’s been running around the island for the last three series, was seen in flashback in 1996 going through the usual torturous Lost “relationship”-type back story. However, what transpired was that it wasn’t actually a flashback at all, but rather Desmond (and by extension the whole cast) have been travelling back in time to re-experience key events in their lives – only now Desmond has developed an awareness of this (in fact his time on the island, ie. the fictional present for us, is being experienced “back in time” by his perception). As such it would appear that all those flashback moments are actually taking place in the characters’ present personal time lines. Or maybe. As is the way with Lost none of this was made too explicit.

But there was a really great “What the??” moment in this episode when Desmond (back in 1996 and in a terribly realised London complete with American spelling of words on bill posters) wandered into a jewellers to buy his fiance an engagement ring. Having struggled with some semblance of a notion that he’d lived these moments before, Des was confronted by a jeweller who after first offering him a ring, then proclaimed “No, you’re not supposed to take it”, and went on to reveal that Desmond’s destiny was to end up on the island. Apparently it doesn’t matter how much he tries to fight against it, time has a way of “course correcting”.

Then just to keep things ticking along nicely, the episode ended with Desmond telling Charlie (he’s the Lord Of The Rings chappy, remember?) that he has foreseen that Charlie will die. What’s more apparently Desmond’s random behaviour over the last few eps (such as erecting a seemingly meaningless pole to catch a lightning bolt) have all been attempts to try and save Charlie’s life.

Apparently, all of this stuff is an appetizer for a major plot revelation that is come later in this third series, and will (supposedly) totally change our perception of what the series is actually about. Oh and the programme makers intend to reveal some time soon just how many eps Lost will run for.