Lost's fifth season gets off to a great start tonight (yes, we've already seen them), and we won't lie--there's a bit of some mind-melting going on right away. To help straighten out what's in store for the Oceanic Six, the castaways stuck on the island, and the island itself, we chatted with Lost showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

(note: this partial transcript was taken from a video interview and has been edited to remove spoilers from tonight's two episodes. The full video interview will be posted before next week's episode)

TV.com: What's going on in season five is a bit complicated. Do you have any tips for viewers to follow along?

Carlton Cuse: Well, look. I think you just kind of have to roll with it, hopefully, and enjoy the ride. We consider this season to be a wonderful adventure story and we love the more overt time-travel elements that are part of the genre storytelling that we're doing. But there's also a lot of great character stuff that we're doing.

So if you love time travel, great, if not, Sawyer's got his shirt off for the entire first episode, so that's great too. We're try to find that balance between what we consider to be really good character stories and fun stuff we do on the mythology axis. It's kind of hard to find the right kind of balance, but we're trying to serve both of those simultaneously.

Damon Lindelof: [partially edited for spoilers] The cool thing about season five is there's really three acts to it. The first act is this condition the island is in and leading up to the events of Locke's death. And chapters two and three are an entirely different animal that we won't even allude to at this point. But suffice to say because our feet are pressed down on the gas pedal now, it moves at a whole different velocity and we're pretty excited about that as well.

TV.com: I'm sure you were aware of just how awesome "The Constant" was before it even aired, you two wrote it after all. Which episodes this season are going to blow our minds?

Carlton Cuse: You know, I think we really love what will be the seventh episode this year…without giving out any details of what it is. We just watched a rough cut of the ninth episode which looks great. We're actually pretty happy. We feel like most of the episodes are pretty strong this season, because we just have this season and next season, we feel like the story-telling is advancing at a really rapid pace, we just don't feel like we're stalling much.

TV.com: We just posted our favorite episodes of Lost, what are some of your favorite episodes from the show?

Damon Lindelof: One of my favorites is "Exodus (part 1)" which is basically the first part of the finale of season one, where the raft is about to launch and Jack and Sawyer are conferring in the jungle, and Jack gives Sawyer the gun which is his first act of trust. I just feel like the writing of that episode was when we were in our first real groove, realizing how far along we'd come over the course of the first season of the show. Not a lot happens in that episode, but there are a lot of genuine, awesome character moments where you realize how attached to these people you've gotten. We love the mythology of the show, we're just as much into the four-toed statue as the next guy, but at its heart and soul, Lost is really about the people. I feel "Exodus (part 1)" is a bastion of that idea.

Carlton Cuse: And you mentioned "The Constant," it would have to be right up there for me. It took us five weeks to break that episode, whereas we'd do an average episode in eight to 10 days. We really didn't know when we broke it that it was going to come out as good as it did. It wasn't just us as writers, it was Jack Bender's fantastic directing, Henry Ian Cusick's [Desmond Hume] acting, Sonya Walger's [Penelope Widmore] acting, and then Mark Goldman, who edited that episode. Television is a collaborative medium, everyone was at the top of the game in that episode.

Be sure to check back for our full conversation with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. For more on Lost, check TV.com's previous coverage.