NEW YORK (AP) — For eight long months, we had no contact with our friends on the island.

Now, at the start of the new season of "Lost" (Thursday at 10 p.m. on ABC), we find the castaways right where we left them last May: thinking they're about to be saved.

But nothing is ever what it seems on "Lost." The guessing game is about to resume for the castaways, and for us.

This season has been whittled to just eight episodes thanks to the writers strike, with 40 more hours before the saga concludes in 2010.

Still, it's not too soon to marvel at the ingenuity and wild ambition that "Lost" has displayed — and how it, somehow, has continued to surprise us.

When the series was announced in 2004, its basic concept seemed intriguing, but also gimmicky and unsustainable. How long could a show keep plane crash victims on a tropical island without their getting found or getting ridiculous?

"Lost" quickly demonstrated how. It created a world of seemingly limitless possibilities, thanks to the evolving set of personalities that continues to replenish the island population.

And also thanks to the flashbacks filling in its characters' lives before the fateful crash of Oceanic flight 815, flashbacks that let the series time-shift and place-shift wherever it might roam, expanding the show beyond any insular constraints and literally spinning its narrative around the globe.

"Lost" quickly demonstrated something else: a tendency to get inside our heads.

Central to the "Lost" experience are crazy-making questions like "What can you believe?" and "Who can you trust?" Now, with the fourth-season return of "Lost," we are thrust back into that familiar mind-set plaguing the survivors, people with whom we have already shared much confusion.

Parsing out buried meaning and clues is an integral part of our "Lost" viewing process. So is sorting out the series' information (and disinformation) overload.

Likewise, lots of head-scratching (good luck making sense of the February 7 episode, which introduces more new characters and mysteries).

And so is trying to predict where the story will go next, which, with "Lost," is a fool's mission.

In fact, there have been many times that "Lost" made us feel like fools — especially during stretches when too much murkiness and too little action made us feel like fools just for sticking around.

But even when it took a wrong turn or bogged down — when "Lost" got lost in its own complications — it never failed to find its way again, and to hook us anew. Repeatedly, it has defied the odds and detractors alike.

Then, with last season's finale, it cooked up yet another challenge for itself, expanding its tale into a new dimension: the future.

That gripping episode caught up with Jack (Matthew Fox) and Kate (Evangeline Lily) beyond their "present-day" existence on the island.

They were in Los Angeles, where Kate had a boyfriend, though his identity wasn't clear. Jack, distraught at having lost her, was a pill-popping, boozy, near-suicidal wreck.

On Thursday's premiere, "Lost" trips into the future again. We see Jack, not quite so much in crisis. And we see yet another former island castaway, also living in Los Angeles, unhinged and terrified by eerie visions.

Message: At least a few of the islanders apparently will escape. There is life after the island. But it won't necessarily be pretty.

So "Lost" is further upping the ante, and heightening the pressure on us as the show's vast mythology continues to metastasize.

We viewers have often been troubled and bewildered by events on the island. But through it all, we could take consolation that the mysteries were confined to a distant, isolated no man's land.

That's no longer the case. Now "Lost" is dumping its characters' struggle in our laps, bringing it to our doorstep as we watch from our living room.

Characters, alive and suffering, are being glimpsed in the here and now. They walk among us, not just at a comfortable remove lost on an island.

Thursday's episode is titled "The Beginning of the End," which says a mouthful. We find "Lost" has started preparing us, along with its characters, for the end — the kind of ending where they won't live happily ever after.

Or will they? By now, we should know we can't count anything out. That, most of all, is the charm of "Lost."