Welcome to His Unreality

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On set, say colleagues and stars, Abrams is cheerful and eager--"a kid in a candy store," says Garner--but perfectionist. For Lost's pilot, he bought a passenger jet, over the objections of his crew, who wanted to use a smaller plane, and had it chopped up and shipped to the set in Hawaii. When this year's Alias season premiere failed to blow his socks off, he reshot the whole thing, in five days. The fans pay him back in cultlike intensity. Fans on the Internet spin extended Lost theories: that the castaways are dead and in limbo, that the polar bear et al. are manifestations of the characters' subconscious, that the show is a religious allegory.

Farfetched? Maybe not. Like a religious text, Lost is open to endless interpretation. In one episode, Kate and con man Sawyer (Josh Holloway) fight over a locked briefcase that she says holds something of hers. Sawyer offers to give it to her if she will say what's inside. "I don't care what it is," he says. "What's burning me up is why it means so much to you." The line is a perfect summary of Alias' and Lost's maddening appeal. Their characters hold secrets behind impenetrable locks. We know that the mysteries will never be solved--or will be replaced with more tantalizing ones. Yet all that matters to us is why those mysteries matter to the characters, and with how much panache and heart Abrams and crew convey their passion. "It's like hiking in a fog," Abrams says. "The closer you get, the more you see, but the more you realize the way to get there is so unexpected."

And so we ride along, like travelers following a map with a spooky promise at its tattered edge: HERE BE MONSTERS. --Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles