{alltv} Get 'Lost' with season six

Namaste! Now get Lost again. The acclaimed if confusing, challenging and controversial television series is back, a beautiful thing to behold.

On Tuesday, Lost: The Complete Sixth Season debuts on DVD and Blu-ray. In Blu-ray, the set is a five-disc set housed in a compact plastic blue box.

The fifth disc contains a delicious menu of on-board extras, including the documentary The End: Crafting a Final Season (absolutely worth watching).

The final session of Lost University: Master's Program is also available through an active Internet connection.

The same day, Tuesday, Disney releases Lost: The Complete Collection, also on DVD and Blu-ray.

This is a spectacular box set offering all six seasons and its 117 episodes, plus all season-by-season extras and those tangential shorts that fill in story gaps. For example, season six comes with the fresh 12-minute chapter, The New Man in Charge, a kind of origins kick-in-the-teeth tease.

The premium box also comes with souvenir items: a glossy episode guide (although the disc numbering does not jibe with what is actually on Blu-ray), a handful of artifacts such as an Ankh with Jacob's "secret message", a blacklight flashlight and a Senet board game with playing stones, introduced in season six.

The 35 discs of the six seasons are housed in season-by-season folders with cardboard slots. In the case of DVD, that is problematic because discs can scratch. With Blu-ray, the discs are more scratch resistant so the overall result is a slick presentation with the six seasons packaged with the souvenirs in a cool cardboard pyramid inspired by Lost's island.

But I am still searching for the 36th disc devoted to extra extras. Can't find that sucker - and I even searched the box for a hidden compartment. Is it Lost in a sideways flashback-forward?

But the examination of season six - both on the separate six set and on the six set in the complete collection - is fascinating in relation to the total series. Co-creators Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof obviously went to the wall to handcraft a finale worth watching, whether or not all fans agreed.

"We got to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end," Cuse says. "I hope that, in hindsight, people will feel that the journey was worth it ...

We felt that we owed the audience a final season of the show that answered some questions and provided sort of a fair ending."

"When the Lost card flashes up there for the final time," Lindelof says, "I want them (viewers) to just sit back and say: 'Wow, you know, I'm satisfied!'"

Actor Ken Leung (Miles) puts Lost in perspective: "T.S. Eliot, I think, said that, after all our travels, we arrive at the place where we started and experience it as if for the first time." On a crude yet amusing level, that is why the filmmakers stuck Evangeline Lilly (Kate) back in a tree for the final season. Other full-circle things are more sophisticated and extensive.

One intriguing element is the line-up of interviews with producers of other shows, with their reflections on their own finales. "I believe that the end of The X-Files was really sort of about retiring on your own terms," says producer-director Rob Bowman. "I never voluntarily ended anything," says Stephen J. Cannell. "I've done 42 shows ... I never had the chance to finish one off the right way."

Shawn Ryan, creator of The Shield, says pointedly: "To me, a mark of a show that you want to be taken seriously in the canon of TV history is going to have an ending that makes you sort of re-examine the beginning."

Now the fans can do just that. Lost is complete, in all its complexity and glory.

Ont. 'Lost' castaway eager for DVD release

Judging by the reaction of Lost cast member Kevin Durand, even the actors on that series are eager for its arrival on DVD and Blu-ray. Especially in the big-ass bonanza set, Lost: The Complete Collection. It debuts, along with Lost: The Complete Sixth Season, on Tuesday. Both come in DVD or Blu-ray.

"I'm excited!" Durand enthused in an interview. For one thing, the tall Canadian - who grew up in the rugged Ontario city of Thunder Bay - has not even seen most of Lost, even though he joined the ensemble in 2008.

"Quite honestly," Durand says grinning, "my fiancee and I, we've started from season one. We're up to season two. I had never watched any shows (before being cast as Martin Keamy). And, when I got it, I made a very, very specific decision about Keamy: That he doesn't know these people. So I didn't want to have any kind of information about them, even if it was just a subconscious connection."

So, when Keamy comes across the other characters, whether Evangeline Lilly as Kate Austen or Matthew Fox as Jack Shephard, it should not register, Durand explains. "You're all just targets to me, because I was on a very specific mission."

Teased that he - or his alter ego Keamy - sounds like a heartless bastard, Durand shrugs it off. "You've got to do what you've got to do."

Durand, who is actually an amiable guy with good manners and kind thoughts towards his Lost co-stars, is on a roll in his 13-year TV and film career. He plays Little John to pal Russell Crowe's Robin Hood in the new big-screen version of that legend. And he is watching all of Lost in his spare time.