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Intrigued and confused by ABC’s smash “Lost”?

Join the club.

On average, 16.7 million viewers watch the series each week (Wednesdays, 9 p.m. EST), with varying degrees of commitment.

It is certainly possible to enjoy “Lost” as a straightforward castaway saga, a dramatic latter-day “Gilligan’s Island.”

But it’s far more fun to get caught up in the conspiratorial spirit of the show, to try to connect the tantalizing dots that “Lost’s” writers scatter through every episode, both in the interactions of the plane-crash survivors and in the flashback scenes devoted to individual characters.

Some fans go to the extent of recording and then poring over each episode, frame by frame, to search for clues – or, as Lostoholics refer to them, “reveals” – about what is really going on on this island.

Certainly, “Lost” rewards that kind of obsessive attention. This dense, mysterious and intensely self-referential show is TV’s spookiest program since “Twin Peaks.” Speculating about its deeper meaning has become a cottage industry on the Internet.

And each week there is fascinating new grist for the mill. Even in an episode as purely narrative and character-driven as last week’s, when Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) became the tribe’s first outcast because he kept trying to snatch Claire’s (Emilie de Ravin) baby, there are some obscure nuggets to puzzle over.

“In the opening scene, there are whispers coming from the jungle,” Jeremy Domby, administrator of a popular “Lost” Web site, said just after last week’s show. “In the past, when those whispers have been slowed down and enhanced, they provide clues to what will happen. For instance, the whispers told us that Shannon’s (Maggie Grace) character was going to be killed and who would do it – Anna Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez).

“But you have to have some very sophisticated hardware to hear what they’re saying.”

The name of Domby’s Web site, 4815162342.com, reflects the reverential culture that has sprung up around “Lost.” It refers to the string of six numbers – 4 8 15 16 23 42 – that figures repeatedly in the plot.

They are the numbers that have to be entered into the computer in the bunker, without fail, every 108 minutes (the sum of the numbers); they were the winning lottery numbers for Hurley (Jorge Garcia), which brought him nothing but bad luck; they were imprinted on the concrete hatch; they appeared on the vial that Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) injected himself with in the season premiere; and they were part of the SOS recording left by an earlier group of castaways.

And if you looked closely during one flashback scene, they were the numbers on the jerseys of a soccer team jogging through an airport.

That’s what fans love about “Lost”: its meticulous attention to detail, its recurring themes, and the ingenious ways the characters’ lives overlap. But what does it all mean?

The premise of “Lost” makes it part of a rich narrative tradition that extends from Homer to the current blockbuster “King Kong.” Remote islands have always served as allegorical devices – places where time, space and nature may adopt different rules.

“Like Robinson Crusoe in the novel by Daniel Defoe, “Lost’s’ characters have been ripped from their established places in a civilized community and forced to confront basic issues of survival,” Paul Stuewe, an English professor at Vermont’s Green Mountain College, writes by e-mail. “Like the British schoolboys marooned in William Golding’s novel “The Lord of the Flies,’ what they assumed were more or less permanent human values and behaviors have suddenly been challenged by a new environment that completely changes the rules of the social game.”

Several students of “Lost” have pointed out the plot similarities to “The Mysterious Island,” a lesser-known novel by Jules Verne.

But the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, bound from Sydney to Los Angeles, have not crashed on some primitive isle. As we learned this season, they have stumbled onto the site of an odd scientific experiment, the Dharma Initiative, with far-reaching, possibly apocalyptic consequences. Perhaps that explains how you can have a polar bear on a tropical island. Then again, perhaps not.

One thing is certain: They are not alone. There is another nonnative tribe, known as the Others, who are hostile and far better provisioned, on the other side of the island.

“We’re just beginning to get to know the Others,” says Jim Farrelly, director of film studies at the University of Dayton by e-mail. “This week’s dream sequence didn’t help much, but the writers appear to be planting ironic religious symbolism everywhere to foreshadow some kind of new creation or transformation that will soon occur. The Us vs. Them conflict for control of the island is clearly on the horizon, but the nature and timing of that clash remains shrouded in mystery.”

All the debate about “Lost” shifted significantly in January when the monster in the jungle was startlingly revealed to be a black cloud. Powerful, fast-moving and shape-shifting, the cloud appears to confront the survivors – in this episode Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) – weigh their souls, and then either dispatch or spare them. The appearance of the cloud changed everything.

“The consensus,” Domby says, speaking for the fan community, “is that it’s some sort of security device or mechanism on the island to take people based on whether they’re good or bad. It tried to take Locke (Terry O’Quinn). They prevented it by throwing dynamite. It did not take Mr. Eko.”

Using scientific methods, Cliff Ravenscraft, the creator of Generally Speaking, a fan podcast devoted to “Lost,” believes he has uncovered the origins and true nature of the black cloud.

“I took a screen capture of the black cloud as it is leaving Mr. Eko and superimposed a cropped cover of Michael Crichton’s “Prey’ over it,” he says. “It fit like a puzzle piece.”

Crichton’s novel is about nanobot technology, intelligent microscopic devices that are part mechanical, part biological.

“The most talked-about theory lately,” Ravenscraft says, “is that the black cloud is composed of nanobots that may have gotten out of the control of the Dharma Initiative and become self-aware. That may be the “incident’ that is referenced on the show. There is talk that perhaps the nanobots have entered into John Locke’s bloodstream, which may explain why he can now walk even though he’s paralayzed.”

And that’s just the tip of this tropical iceberg. Ravenscraft is convinced that the plane crash that launched this TV enigma “was no accident.

“I believe the plane was brought there by the Dharma project to crash-land,” he says. “My wife vigorously disagrees with me and so do half the panelists on my podcast. But I have too much evidence.”

Talking to rabid Lostoholics, you learn, is like debating with the Lone Gunman trio from “X Files”: They are deadly serious.

“That only applies if I don’t go with another theory I have, which is that the flight never really happened,” Ravenscraft continues. “They were never on a plane. They’ve been cryogenically frozen and all these flashbacks they’re having are implanted memories.”

He expands on this scenario for several minutes and then pauses. “This is how crazy we are about this show,” he says, laughing.

Spread by the Internet, “Lost” fever is beginning to infect other parts of the world as well. Ravenscraft tallied that his latest podcast, available at ravenscraft.org, was downloaded in 47 countries. “In most of these places, they’re watching the show illegally,” he notes. But with no less relish.

“With all this attention devoted to finding a unifying theory that will explain “Lost,” you have to wonder if there is a grand design behind all this. Or are the writers just making it up as they go along?

Either way, it’s fun to get totally “Lost.”