Is the show captivating because it's so mysterious? Or is it getting too mysterious for its own good?

I don't know about you, but I groaned in the second season of "Lost" when we started getting backstories of a whole new group of people, the Others. Like we needed more to keep track of. Tonight, the "rescuers" finally landed on the island — and we got a couple of their flashback backstories before we even met them in the present. So now we have the original plane crash survivors, the Others, and the Other Others. And, like the naked city, they're full of a million stories. And my brain hurts. I've stopped even trying to crack the code of this madness. Just sit back, watch the puzzle pieces fly around, try to see the beauty in it, like the whirling trash in "American Beauty."

At one point in last night's "Project Runway," guru Tim Gunn said, "We have to let our divas go." He was referring to the ladies of WWE, for which the designers had the unenviable task of creating Spandex wrestling costumes, but he could have easily been saying it about the season-long process of winnowing the ninnies. And last night — whew! — we finally got rid of the last piece of deadwood.