Glass Half Empty, Or Half Full?

It's come out over the last couple of days that Lost Season Four, for which eight episodes were already in the can prior to the WGA Strike, will end up being thirteen strong (down from the original plan of sixteen episodes). Since it wasn't all that long ago that we were staring down the barrel of the very real possibility of only getting those original eight new Losts this year, the new total of thirteen seems downright... lucky to me! Even more interesting are Carlton Cuse's statements about the plan to cram all of the story that was sketched out for the sixteen-part Season Four into those thirteen episodes (while also promising to eventually pay back the missing three later in the run). Since television's best fourth season ever may very well have belonged to Babylon 5 ("No Surrender, No Retreat"), and it came about because J Michael Straczynski believed that the final two seasons needed to be compressed into one, this could be a very good sign for Lost fans over the next several months.

The one unfortunate bit of news in all this is the expectation of a four week lull between the airing of the last original new episode (from before the strike) and the start of the new new chapters. March may end up being a Lost dead zone, in that way.