All is revealed as the popular television program Lost airs its final season. (CTV)

On Feb. 2, ABC will air the sixth and final season premiere of its hit series Lost. After being utterly confounded for five years by the drama's twists and turns, fans are finally going to discover what the heck has been going on all this time.

Lost is in many ways a tale without a hero — or at the very least, a recognizable one.

To some, Lost is a religious allegory, a kind of Pilgrim's Progress with hunks. Others see it as a fantastic playground for the unconscious — the show has Daddy issues that not even a duet between Sigmund Freud and Cat Stevens could express. Absorbing the history of Western philosophy, literature, religion, music and art, Lost is as allusive as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and unpacking its cultural references is just as much fun.

The brainchild of TV producer JJ Abrams (Felicity, Alias) and writers/producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Lost premiered in September 2004 with a go-big-or-go-watch-CSI approach. The first few seconds of the pilot are a study in the art of defying audience expectation. That quick-fire dramatic pacing has won the series a near hysterical fan base. The writers' storytelling genius has been to keep viewers guessing — always.

Here's what we can say for sure: on Sept. 22, 2004, Flight 815 took off from Sydney, Australia, bound for Los Angeles. Somewhere near Fiji, it crashed onto a seemingly deserted island. Nearly 50 passengers survived (though we only really care about a dozen or so). Inexplicable things start happening on this magical island: a terminally ill cancer patient is healed; a paralyzed man walks; a dead man lives. The island's "natives" include creepy people called "others," polar bears and a smoke monster. And that's just season one.

Matthew Fox plays Dr. Jack Shephard on Lost. (CTV)

Lost's antecedents include such disparate offerings as Gilligan's Island and Twin Peaks. But no network drama has challenged the conventions of TV heroism quite like Lost. The show is in many ways a tale without a hero — or at the very least, a recognizable one.

No character in the show's ensemble screams hero more than Dr. Jack Shephard, played by actor Matthew Fox. And no character does more to subvert the conventional hero mold. The handsome doctor is a very familiar figure to TV — on any other show, Fox would be the moral touchstone, a stabilizing force. Not so on Lost — this should-be hero is a real mess. Jack is angry, stubborn, self-absorbed and afflicted with a compulsive urge to "fix things." He has no insight into the situation he finds himself in and even less self-knowledge.

Jack's motto — "live together, die alone" — is heroic, but his motivations aren't quite so simple. He does things because he feels he needs to do them, not because they're inherently good or wise. This isn't to say that Jack hasn't risen to the challenge — he's had some glorious moments, but they've never been consistent. Jack is too human to be the virtuous McDreamy, too interesting to be as omniscient as C.S.I. Miami's Horatio Caine (Mc-Diculous?).

Jack's near-fanatical conversion to the idea of destiny in season five — a notion he once violently opposed — is born largely out of emotion arising from the heartbreak of losing the love of fellow castaway Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and from his complete failure to be remotely heroic off the island. Like you and me, Jack's filtering reality through a subjective lens, and consequently, he's making mistakes like Tim Horton's is making donuts. You empathize with a character like Jack, but you don't idealize him.

The competition for top dog is a constant on the show. John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) is Jack's greatest rival for the role of alpha male, and he has repeatedly challenged him for control over the survivors and their fate. (Locke's psychological makeup is even more complicated and affecting than Jack's.) In fact, most of the show's main characters — from Kate, the fugitive, to lovelorn Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) to former Iraqi torturer Sayid (Naveen Andrews) — have had a brave, self-sacrificing and/or bold moment. But then, just like Jack or Locke, they go and do something cruel, or destructive, or reveal the alarmingly personal reasons behind their actions, throwing the balance off again. At the end of this eternal cycle, the audience and the characters are back in the same rudderless boat.

The writers also give the well-known trajectory of the anti-hero — a.k.a, the bad boy — the boot. On Lost, that role belongs to the Southern con man, Sawyer (Josh Holloway). The id to Jack's superego, Sawyer is self-destructive, self-absorbed and greedy. His motto is "every man for himself," but by the end of season four, he appeared to grow up considerably. Stable, smart and suddenly community-minded, Sawyer took on many of the features of the ready-made hero. Like a good leading man, he was in control of the story — but not for long. Just like that, it was clear that Sawyer didn't know what the heck he was doing, either.

The perpetual jockeying for dominance among Lost's central characters, and their subsequent failure to be "the one," tells a tale all its own. After five seasons, it's clear that no one controls the story, and that there is no one person, perspective or right approach to survival. The lesson that emerges is that a multitude of voices and viewpoints are essential to finding your way out of the wilderness, if at all. Moreover, the portrait of human nature created by the show's writers and cast reflects an alternate vision of heroism: the courage it takes for blinkered humanity to "try again, fail, fail better."

Lost isn't just the title — it's an accurate description of a fantastically exciting locale where an adventure story with a spiritual arc can exist without the safety net that conventional heroes and heroines provide.

The sixth and final season of Lost premieres on Feb. 2 on CTV.

Flannery Dean is a writer based in Hamilton, Ont.