When the Lost season 4 poster was released last season, I took a few minutes to analyze it with you and try to extract clues and spoilers from it. The biggest clues we found in that poster was the skyline of a city reflecting on the water and the number 6, also in the water. Both foreshadowed the Oceanic 6 getting off the island.

It's time to resume our investigation, this time, with the season 5 official poster (see right, bigger version after the jump) which I've found at DocArzt's Lost Blog.

This morning, ABC announced that Lost will get three more seasons, but only 48 more episodes. That means each season will have only 16 episodes, as opposed to the traditional, full-season run of 22-23 episodes. Executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have agreed to stick around for the final three seasons and guide the show to the ending that they want. (Each guy is reportedly getting an 8-figure deal to stick around) Of course, nothing is being said about which actors will be on the show that long.

This new end point pushes about 20 more episodes out of Cuse and Lindelof than they had hoped. Last January, the producers said they saw the show wrapping up at about episode 100, but the new deal pushes Lost's entire run to 120 episodes.

Lost fans, are you willing to wait three more years for answers? Seems like a long time...

I'm not sure if you've been reading Doc Jensen's Lost theories over at Entertainment Weekly's web site. The guy is obsessed (in a good way), and has come up with some very intriguing and plausible ideas on what is really happening on the island and what all the clues (the numbers, the names, how people are connected, etc) might actually mean. Not sure if I follow his logic with his latest theory though.

He's been thinking about the names and what they could mean in the overall picture. The people behind the show have said that the character names have not been chosen randomly. Each name means something (though I wonder what "Hurley" could mean. Does he vomit a lot? Is he really a baseball player?), and the name that especially intrigues him is the new character, Jacob, who we saw in a quick scene on one of the monitors wearing an eyepatch (if that was him, that is!).