'Lost' in time

The second-to-last season of "Lost" ends tonight, and it's been a bumpy ride.

But in a good way.

There's been lots and lots of time travel, with characters jumping from year to year. Much of the action over the past few episodes has taken place three decades ago.

Dead characters have come back to life. Living characters have been killed before they were born. The island itself became disconnected from time. Sort of.

Tonight, the season-to-date is recapped in an hourlong episode at 7 p.m. on Ch. 4. That's followed at 8 p.m. by the two-hour season finale.

The producers insist that they didn't suddenly just inject time travel into "Lost" on a whim. As a matter of fact, they didn't just suddenly inject time travel into the show at all.

"The show's been a time-travel show for the last four years," said executive producer Damon Lindelof. "We're just making it more apparent in the storytelling now.

"Hopefully, as Season 5 unfolds, you will realize that time travel has been in the DNA of the show for quite some time. But we think the audience is now kind of prepared to go on that journey with us."

Lindelof was certainly right about how it became obvious that "Lost" had involved time travel pretty much since it began. As for the events of this season, they've both cleared things up and made them more muddled — simultaneously.

"It is kind of a variable mine field to do time travel," said executive producer Carlton Cuse, "yet it also is incredibly exciting. What we didn't want to do is have Season 5 — the penultimate year of the show — just be a stall. And we really decided that, as we always have in 'Lost,' we were going to take risks and take some chances."

Lindelof said the writing staff has become "fairly masochistic."

"We sit around and go, 'Is it fraught with peril? Yes? Let's do it,' " he said. "That's part of the thing that keeps the show exciting."

He believes viewers watch the show at least in part to see if the writers are "going to reach that point of no return where they've just messed things up so badly. And you can't get to that point unless you're taking risks."