LOST again for 13 weeks.

Lost gets lost after tonight's episode, but will a 13-week break hurt the island mystery's momentum?

ABC's scheduling plan was hatched in May to maintain viewer interest by avoiding dismally low-rated repeats. Instead, the season was split in two, with six episodes this fall and 16 more to run uninterrupted from Feb. 7 to mid-May's two-hour finale. (Day Break, another serialized drama, fills the 9 ET/PT gap starting next week.)

But programmers didn't expect Lost's audience — 16.2 million viewers this season — to slip another 12%, the biggest decline of any returning ABC series. They didn't count on CBS rival Criminal Minds beating it last week.

And they didn't figure that NBC's new Heroes, a similarly mythologized serial, would become more popular among a core crowd of adults ages 18 to 34.

"In a perfect world, for us, the fans and the network, we would love to air the show in the way 24 airs," continuously from January to May, says executive producer Damon Lindelof. But doing so would require fans to go hungry for eight months, and force the network to live, as Fox does, without one of its top series in the fall.

And to pad a 35-week season, there'd be those frequent pesky breaks for repeats, which last season drew about a third of the show's typical audience. That led one savvy webmaster to start IsLostaRepeat.com, which consisted of a home page with a one-word answer.

"With a show as heavily serialized as ours, going in fits and starts was a worse idea than running it in consecutive blocks," executive producer Carlton Cuse says.

"This is better than airing repeats, and it gives the network an opportunity to try and build another successful drama," says Magna Global USA analyst Steve Sternberg. "The real concern is if Day Break tanks and Lost viewers start watching something else and don't return."

Tonight's sixth episode (9 ET/PT) offers no "jaw-dropping" close, but it does provide a "mini-cliffhanger," Lindelof says, "that will ultimately frustrate and intrigue viewers enough that they have to come back after 13 weeks off the schedule."

Fans will rejoice that The Others' imprisonment of Jack, Sawyer and Kate will be resolved in tonight's episode, completing the arc that writers mapped out after learning of ABC's start-and-stop scheduling plan.

Kate will "finally sleep with one of those guys," Cuse says. And the entire ensemble will be more widely seen come February.

"We promise that when we are back, we will definitely be revisiting the characters back on the beach, and they will be central to the show," he says, even as the mystery of The Others, their origins and their penchant for kidnapping children is slowly revealed.

-Source-USA Today

Don't forget that you can watch episodes of LOST for free on ABC.com