As 1980s schlock-rock band Dead or Alive once sang, "You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round round round."

We won't spoil it for you, but for fans of the TV show Lost, those lyrics will take on added significance tonight with the fifth-season debut of the enigmatic but fascinating series on A and ABC.

Personally speaking, we've seen the first three episodes of the new season (two of which air tonight) and we think they're excellent.

But opinions always vary when it comes to Lost, and that's part of the fun. People love to debate not only what really is going on with these airplane-wreck survivors on a mysterious island, but also the intricacies and merits of how the story is being told.

"The show had sort of reached that point (in season No. 3) where we all knew it was treading into an area of complete and utter suckiness," Lost co-creator and co-executive producer Damon Lindelof said during the recent Television Critics Association tour in Universal City, Calif.

"Is that (suckiness) a word? I don't know.

"At that point we all had a decision to make, which was: Are we going to have an end date? Or is the show going to be cancelled in like a year, year-and-a-half? Because it simply couldn't go on the way it was."

Luckily, an end date was chosen. Lost will wrap up for good at the conclusion of its sixth season in 2010.

The concern some fans had when an end date was settled upon was that anything prior to the final season would feel like a holding pattern.

But much to our delight, the first three episodes of season No. 5 don't feel that way at all. Big stuff is happening.

"Basically all these ideas -- the flash-forwards being the first one that we were able to pull the trigger on, and then entering into the end game of the story, which involved a significant amount of non-linear, time-travel storytelling -- were all sort of part of what our plan was," Lindelof said. "But we couldn't start to do any of that stuff until we realized we were working towards an end point."

Tonight, a one-hour clips show will precede back-to-back new episodes for a three-hour Lost extravaganza.

The ride is intensifying. Lost is spinning us right round, baby, right round. Remember those words.