STILL LOST AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

After ten years, LOST's management team continues to avoid answering the tough questions about their own series. At the Paley Center Television convention, several members of the LOST cast and the show runners appeared on a panel discussion. According to Yahoo.tv, there were several statements made by the creative team (and my commentary):

Were they dead the entire time?

"No. They were not dead the entire time," Carlton Cuse said. 

He said that theory may have been exacerbated by the closing shot of the show. (A screen shot is at the bottom of this blog's home page). An ABC executive had suggested they include a buffer between the last scene and the commercial break, so the producers found some footage of the plane fuselage sitting on the beach. That footage incited the theories that everyone aboard had actually perished.

The characters definitely survived the plane crash and really were on a very real island. Damon Lindelof added of the incorrect purgatory theory: "For us, one of the ongoing conversations with the audience and there was a very early perception, was that the island was purgatory and we were always out there saying, 'It's not purgatory, this is real, we're not going to Sixth Sense you.'"

But that scene of everyone in the church? Yeah, they’re all dead there.

And there lies the problem with the creators-writers position. There is no bridge between their constant denials about there being no purgatory, and the fact that the show's climax is set in the after life. And TPTB do not explain how the characters got to the sideways world, living a separate but parallel lives from their mortal island lives. And to blame ABC for the final debris field scene is also absurd since it was the show's producers who had final cut on the finale.

How the characters evolved:

Lindelof admitted that when they cast the show, there was no script. Kim read for the part of Kate. "There was no Sun in the 'Lost' script — because there was no 'Lost' script," he said. "Jorge read for Sawyer, because Hurley didn't exist."

And how did they decide Locke had been in a wheelchair? Lindelof revealed that while shooting the pilot, Terry O'Quinn would go down the beach and listen to his iPod during breaks. Co-creator J.J. Abrams pointed at O'Quinn and told Lindelof, "That guy's got a secret." What secret? "You figure it out."

The bravado needs to stop; the series did have a script by Jeffery Lieber that was greenlit by ABC to start production. No television network starts a production without one. When JJ Abrams got on board, the script was reworked but the essence of the pilot remained, as an arbitration panel found for Lieber in a subsequent creator dispute.

But what this one story does tell us is a bit of confirmation that the writers were creating characters, scenes, information by the seat of their pants. It seems to tout their self-stated genius, but it also questions on whether there was a clear plan for the show from the very beginning.

 Killing off characters:
As many "Lost" fans know by now, the initial plan had been to kill off Jack in the pilot episode. Luckily, ABC executives questioned that move, and the show's producers changed their minds. Instead, the first major character they killed off was Boone, played by Ian Somerhalder, who took the decision so well that Lindelof joked, "We gotta kill more of these guys!"

In the original Writer's Guide, Boone was going to have a bigger role in the series. But that did not happen. As previous posts showed, the writer's guide was quickly dismissed by the show runners, which again is evidence that there was no clear plan for the show.

The outrigger scene:
Lindelof and Cuse admitted that there is an answer to who shot at Sawyer on the outrigger. But the writers ultimately decided that it was "cooler" to keep it a mystery.
"The scene exists. It actually is on paper," Lindelof said. Years from now, they'll auction it off for charity.

This is another "cheat" on the fans/viewers. It is not "cooler" to fool fans into wondering, speculating or arguing over points of the show, when the writers and producers intentionally keep that information from the fans/viewers. The idea of writing a mystery story and NOT solving the mysteries is illogical. Some believe that the producers really did not have a reasonable explanation for this time traveling paradox, so keeping it a secret was better than getting flamed on community fan boards.


 Easter eggs that were never laid:
An audience member asked about the Easter eggs that "Lost" became famous for, and Lindelof said the one he was proudest of was an egg that was never meant to be an egg.

He recounted that someone sent him a screencap from the pilot of Walt standing in front of the fuselage. There was a burn mark on the fuselage that looked like the Dharma Initiative logo — but this was before the writers had even conceived the Dharma Initiative. "Whoa, this is an Easter egg that we did not hide," Lindelof said, jokingly adding, "And I lost all faith in religion."

Again, this a tactic admission that the story producers had no real clue where their episodes would take them. Not knowing about the Dharma Initiative means that half the series was mere inconsequential filler. Such admissions further dilute the integrity of the show's original story line and further calls into the question the plot of the ending.

Hating Nikki and Paulo:

As they've said before, the writers introduced Nikki and Paulo as a reaction to fan discussion about the background characters. But even before the backlash to those characters began, the writers themselves started hating Nikki and Paulo. So they decided to acknowledge their "horrible mistake" in the episode "Expose."

This is another odd turnabout by the producers to deflect criticisms against them. "The fans asked for it," should not be an overriding concern to a creative team that knows what it is doing.

 

How the ending came to be:

As Cuse said, "The show was about people who were lost in their lives." And as he and Lindelof discussed the ending of the series, they agreed it should be spiritual.

Lindelof added that they decided to "solve a mystery we never asked: What's the meaning of life, and what happens when you die?"

Except, they never answered that grand question!  The murderers, con men, cheaters, liars and psychopaths all wound up in a happy fantasy after life (sideways world) with absolutely no punishment for their mortal crimes, sins, transgressions, etc. There was no redemption. In fact, the ending is less spiritual in the context of who these people really were - - - how they lived their lives should have put them through a gauntlet of pain and suffering (i.e. the purgatory angle). But there was no bona fide moral to the LOST story. If anything, it stated it does not matter what bad things you did in life, you will get to heaven with your friends and co-conspirators. And, the final unanswered question remains unanswered: what happened to the characters when the doors opened and the church was engulfed in white light?

The more TPTB speak of LOST, the less cohesive their vision for the series comes to the forefront. The less answers, even now 10 years removed, will be forthcoming.  It gets a twinge of a con-man's victim after a while; "what happened to me?"