Get Lost: A Survivor's Guide...

Series six of Lost begins tomorrow night at 9pm on Sky1. Can't wait. But for those you who have maybe either not watched it, have forgotten what has happened thus far, or indeed are just plain confused by the labyrinthine plot here is a quick survivor's guide.

Series one
On a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, Oceanic flight 815 crash-landed on a deserted Pacific island, leaving 48 survivors, including: handsome doctor Jack, sexy fugitive Kate, smouldering conman Sawyer, miraculously cured paraplegic Locke, former Iraqi torturer Sayid, heroin-addicted rock star Charlie, overweight lottery winner Hurley and a dog called Vincent. Jack and Kate looked like getting frisky on the beach where the survivors made their camp, but Kate was also attracted to the roguish Sawyer. In the meantime, the jungle started spewing forth smoke monsters and hungry polar bears. Locke discovered a hatch in the ground somewhere in the jungle and spent most of the series trying vainly to open it.

Series two
Some survivors from the other half of the plane – which crashed across the island – trekked to the beach to find their fellow passengers, only to spend the rest of series two getting killed one by one. The "Others", the original inhabitants of the island who'd been snooping around killing and/or kidnapping survivors, lived in holiday chalets and were led by Ben, a budget version of Kevin Spacey doing "sinister". Locke blew the hatch open and found angry Scotsman Desmond down in the island's concrete catacombs, listening to records and pressing a button to prevent the destruction of the world (don't ask). Locke decided not to press the button. The world sort of ended – well, the sky went all white for a minute or two.

Series three
Desmond woke up seeing the future – specifically, that Charlie was going to die, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Charlie died. Meanwhile, Jack, Kate and Sawyer were taken prisoner by the Others. Jack agreed to operate on Ben's cancerous kidney. Kate and Sawyer got freaky. Jack got friendly with Juliet, one of the Others, then helped Kate and Sawyer escape. Locke dumped his friends and started hanging out with the Others. Locke and Ben went to see a ghost called Jacob in a hut in the jungle. Then Ben shot Locke because he felt threatened by how chummy he was getting with the other Others. (Ben is deeply insecure.) A freighter arrived to take the survivors home. Or did it...?

Series four
Four sciencey people from the freighter landed on the island in a helicopter, but they were more interested in finding Ben than they were in saving the Oceanic survivors. And it turns out the sciencey people weren't the only ones on the freighter; there were also a band of mercenaries sent by the villainous Charles Widmore (Jim from 'Neighbours'), hell bent on killing everyone. But Sayid and the Others somehow kicked their asses anyway. Claire disappeared in the jungle. Like, literally disappeared. Locke took over leadership of the Others. Ben pulled an underground lever and moved the island. Like, literally moved it. The sky went all white again. Some of the survivors were in the helicopter when the island moved, so they crash-landed in the ocean, only to be rescued by Desmond's girlfriend, Penny, in her posh boat. Penny, incidentally, happens to be the daughter of Jim from 'Neighbours' – sorry, I mean "Charles Widmore".

Series five
Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sun, Sayid and Claire's baby returned to the mainland claiming they were the only survivors of the crash. Sayid became a hitman. Hurley became a nutjob. Jack became an alcoholic, then persuaded the rest of his reluctant friends to return to the island. On the island, things went mental. The characters kept involuntarily flashing through time, which gave some of them killer nosebleeds. Eventually, they were stuck in the 1970s, where they pretended to be part of the Dharma initiative. We met two guys who'd been on the island for a very long time. One wore white and was called Jacob. One wore black and wanted to kill Jacob. Ben and Locke killed Jacob instead. Faraday, one of the sciencey guys from the freighter, decided to detonate a hydrogen bomb and destroy all the magnetic energy that caused the plane crash in the first place, which would reset the clocks and put everyone back where they started, on that flight to LA. After a lot of shooting, grenade-throwing and so forth, the bomb fell down a hole, where Juliet banged it with a rock. The sky went all white. Again.