The season opener, "Tale of Two Cities," is just jam-packed with great stuff -- particularly the Jack-Sarah backstory of the dissolution of their marriage. Heavy stuff.

(One thing I'm not entirely clear on: Jack attacks his dad at the AA meeting, thinking he's been messing around with Sarah -- but that's just Jack being crazy-paranoid, right? I can't see Sarah fooling around with Christian.)

These are the days of fish biscuits, Juliet getting to an uneasy peace with Jack and of course, the priceless scene of Ben showing Jack footage of the unthinkable -- the Red Sox winning the World Series in "The Glass Ballerina." That same seg has great Sun-Jin backstory and their relation to Mr. Paik. I found it interesting that in this seg Sun suggests to Jin that they run away and start a new life somehow.

"Further Instructions," third episode of the season, seems to foreshadow a lot with the flashbacks of Locke in the hippie fruit- and pot-growing farm, where Locke picks up the hitchhiker (in a Geronimo Jackson T-shirt!) who happens to be an undercover cop. The idea of Locke being part of an alternative commune-type society up off the beaten path in Northern California run by a couple, Jan and Mike, has all kinda Dharma parallels, natch.

There's much more to love in those six segs:

Sawyer's backstory in prison and the revelation of his daughter Clementine;

Hurley running into Desmond in his birthday suit ("You're not going to like, turn in to the Hulk or something?" Hugo asks after Des explains the business about the hatch imploding.);

The death of the femme Other named Colleen, wife of the really nasty Ben henchman Pickett, whose demise from a gunshot fired by Sun clearly has a huge impact on Juliet, in a fine bit of wordless acting by Elizabeth Mitchell;

Ben leading Sawyer up to the cliff so he can see that he's imprisoned on a separate island, and then quoting back "Of Mice and Men" to Sawyer;

Mr. Ecko getting the you-know-what beaten out of him over and over, until he loses in the jungle with creepy visions of his brother and a final do-see-do with Smokey;

Juliet doing her version of the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" sequence from "Don't Look Back," when she's purportedly showing Jack a vid of "To Kill a Mockingbird" while actually trying to give him instructions to kill Ben on the operating table;

A brief shot that made me jump in my chair: The first glimpse of Cyclops! In the seg "Cost of Living" where Nikki, of all people, suggests they might try to tune in some of the other monitors in the Pearl station hatch to see if there's any connection to other stations. When that snowy screen tunes in to Mikael looking back at them and then covering the camera on his end ... chilling;

"Don't mistake coincidence for fate," Locke tells Des in "Cost of Living." So true, so true.

Our "Lost" heroes Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse may not have had the same kind of storytelling clarity in season three as they have had this season, after setting the series end date for 2010, but they're definitely laying tracks in these segs that move the story along in important ways.