Lost Season 4 Spoilers from TCA

The TV critics who have the luxury of attending the TCAs (and please don’t tell me it’s not a luxury – try being denied) for the past few weeks were all up in arms this morning when ABC President Steve McPherson mentioned that there would be some new details about Season 4 of LOST announced at Thursday’s Comic Con panel in San Diego.  Seems the critics forget that the show lives and dies with the fans and not with critics…but don’t tell them that.  How dare ABC share details with fans of the show who are so diehard that they will pay for a ticket to Comic Con and then wait in line hours and hours just for the chance to make it into the panel. Right? [/end of rant]

Well ABC caved to the critics and spilled the beans early.

So what is this news that has caused such a stir?  Well to be honest, I wasn’t floored by it, but here it is…

It was announced today that Harold Perrineau will be reprising his role of Michael next season.

As a fan I was always assuming that Michael would come back into the picture at some point in time.  If he didn’t then it would have been a major plot faux pas on behalf of the writers.  The writers were well aware of this too, so when Harold didn’t jump at the chance to return at the end of last season (as was originally intended) the writers and ABC started panicking. So that’s that – Michael will be back?  Now whether or not Walt will be with him is still up in the air.  Still not sure how the writer’s will deal with that whole puberty thing with Walt – but that’s a problem for them to fix.