A couple weeks ago, Lost drew its smallest audience for a new episode a fade that’s come prematurely:

The show was smart and intriguingly spiked with supernatural and sci-fi twists. It featured hot new stars who graced glossy magazine covers — until the ratings tumbled.

So much for “The X-Files,” which enjoyed a nine-year run before misguided plots and a time slot change eroded its appeal. Flash forward to today and you’ll find its counterpart in “Lost,” another spooky, cerebral, sexy show — which may end up killed off before its time.

“`Lost’ is the tragedy of the season,” said Marc Berman, TV analyst for Media Week Online as well as a fan aggrieved by what he considers ABC’s bungled handling of a favorite show. “They really prematurely put the nail in the coffin. It’s too late to save it.”

The saga of plane-crash survivors stranded on a dangerous and surreal island once drew an impressive 20 million-plus viewers as it helped raise ABC from ratings purgatory, gained cultural-phenomenon status and won the 2005 Emmy for best drama. But eight episodes into its third season, “Lost” has taken a painful nosedive, with an audience of 14.5 million for its Feb. 7 episode and 12.8 million — its lowest ever — for this week’s show…

That final chapter should have been years off for a property which, along with “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” helped ABC (owned by Walt Disney Co.) regain ratings traction and buzz.

In the days leading to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip’s final episode before heading into hiatus, there was a decent amount of failure analysis on where the highly anticipated show went wrong (and I still say a key problem was that the “inside baseball” drama just had too many moments that rang distractingly untrue). My mind has been more focused on where Lost went wrong lately, so maybe it’s time to start putting the first nails in Lost’s coffin.

Overall, Lost’s downfall can be summarized in the complaint that comes from many of the show’s former fans — that they don’t believe the show’s producers know where they’re going. Now, it very well may be the case that the producers have a definite endgame in mind but their sin greater than that — they lost the illusion that they knew what they were doing.

I don’t think the unanswered questions are the problem as much as that as the show continues, Lost has added mysteries that didn’t show a satisfying progression and that mysteries seem to have been abandoned. Take the questions raised by the flashbacks focusing on Boone and Shannon, Michael and Walt or Libby and Hurley. Those questions look likely to go unanswered now that all but one of those characters have been written out of the show (typically in sweeps month violence). Those may have been dramatic moments, but after the initial rush of adrenaline has passed, one starts to feel like a short term gain was made at the cost of a larger payoff in the future. A number of the questions raised early in the first season felt like an afterthought in the second season — how did a polar bear end up on a tropical island? did Walt have mysterious powers? what kind of creature could be shaking up the island’s jungle in such a threatening manner? Perhaps those questions were answered subtly in a way that many viewers missed, if they did the more important factor is that Lost failed to make its audience feel like it was rewarded for asking those questions in the first place.

Equally troubling, however, was that in its second season Lost seemed to get stuck in a rut. Further flashback episodes for Jack and Sawyer didn’t reveal much additional information about their characters, increasing frustration that the show was feeling like less of an ensemble drama than the one that debuted — other characters still had untold stores but, for some reason, Lost’s producers felt the need to continue to examine how Sawyer was a rogue with a heart of gold. Increasing the frustration, in focusing largely on a few characters, the show’s original non-white characters got de-emphasized. In all likelihood, there was no overt racism in this shift, but viewers who were excited by the diversity of the show’s cast found themselves in frustratingly familiar territory when it turned out that the characters deemed by the producers to be the most interesting were all white. (Consider yourself warned, Heroes… you’re getting close to that danger zone as we speak.)

There’s a little bit of debate if Heroes makes for a better sci-fi serial than Lost with Lost fans noting that Heroes hasn’t had to maintain enthusiasm in its audience or keep several balls in the air as long as Lost. That argument flew out the window for me with this week’s Heroes. In “Company Man” the show answered plenty of questions while raising new ones that are built upon the answers just given. A few characters were at the focus of the episode and yet I never felt like anyone creatively responsible for this episode had forgotten about the rest of the cast. In short, it raised new questions in a way that made them look like new storytelling possiblities, when Lost raised new questions it usually feels like an attempt at distraction.