LOST, ESQ.

Esquire magazine had a recent interview with the LOST showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.  In the interview, TPTB made several interesting statements and admissions about their series:

Point One:  TPTB wanted to make sure there was no ambiguity as to whether we were finished. We'll call the final episode "The End," we'll kill every major character off — and then not only kill them off but show what happens to them after they're dead. That's as far as you can go!
We thought about reincarnation but that was just a step too far.


Point Two: The TPTB thought early on that the story couldn't be told chronologically. We understood that one of the challenges of the show was going to be that we had to slow things down. There was a natural inertia of the show for them to get off the island or for them to begin resolving some of the mysteries on the island. The flashback, on a narrative level, became a way of slowing down the storyline but also starting multiple stories in multiple places in time. We wanted it to allow us the largest canvas possible so when you step back from the show and look at the overall image, there were interesting things happening anywhere in the image. So when one place was running low on story you could go start work on another area until you suddenly realized how it connected again. 

Point Three: In the middle of season three, TPTB alleged asked ABC to end the show --- three years out - - - the idea that the narrative device was going to flip out of flashbacks and into flash forwards. Once we did that we assumed people would stop asking us if we were making it up as we went along because you have to move forward on the trajectory you've set up.  Once we had the end date it really allowed us to plan out what it was that we were going to do for the remaining three years of the show.


Point Four: TPTB were aware that someone re-edited the entire series into chronological order. Lindelof said he wished he had the time to watch that and I love it when fans reshape the story to fit their own specifications. But for TPTB, so much time and energy went into designing these episodes. So the idea that someone unwound all that stuff just to tell the show in chronological order makes it the least interesting version of Lost. 


Point Five: TPTB admitted that they trapped themselves into  corners while writing the show.
"A lot of times we intentionally painted ourselves into corners. As Damon used to say, "Well, then we'll just walk up the wall." That was a fun part of the storytelling — to create challenges for ourselves."

Point Six: There were regrets in their stories.  The only place we ever got stuck was when we did things we regretted doing, not that they were narrative cul-de-sacs but like Nikki and Paulo. That was an example of a story idea where once we'd initiated it we regretted having done it. Or, on a smaller scale, when we told the story of Jack flashing back to Thailand and how he got his tattoos, we really regretted that we had decided that was a worthy flashback story. That story became really instrumental in convincing ABC that we needed to end the show. We were like, "Okay, this is what flashbacks look like now so it's probably a good idea if we figure out how much longer this show is actually going to go." 


Point Six and One-Half: The worst episode of Lost was  the episode where Jack gets his tattoos in Thailand.Even the TPTB think it's cringe-worthy, where he's flying the kite on the beach. It was not our finest hour. We used Matthew Fox's real tattoos. That's how desperate we were for flashback stories.

Point Seven:  TPTB knew early on how committed the fans were to the show. The show took on that of a cult life. Which is very rare because usually what defines a cult show is that there are not a lot of people watching it or it's on the verge of cancellation so people are rallying around it. But Lost had this huge viewership and it also had this cult fanbase. One thing we never predicted was that as the show was launching there was also the advent of social media. We were making a show that was intentionally ambiguous and was a mystery. All of a sudden there was this vehicle by which people could communicate with each other over the Internet. The show and social media just happened to come along at the same time, and it was the perfect thing for people to talk about over social media. We benefitted from this natural confluence of events. It was just sort of alchemy. 

Point Eight: TPTB's favorite  Lost fan theory? Cuse said there was a theory that it was all taking place in the dog's head. Lindelof remarked that one of the most popular theories during the first season was that they were in purgatory — that they had all died on the plane. That was not our favorite theory because it feels like we were saying it in season one, we were saying it in season two, and we're saying it three years after the show ended that it wasn't that. Cuse said " It's okay, nobody believes us." Another popular theory was that the island itself was some sort of crashed spaceship and the hatch only fed into that thinking. The idea was when they blast this thing open and go down they're going to be inside of some UFO and then the island is just going to lift off out of the water and blast into space for season two. There was a part of me (Lindelof) that was always like, "It would be so great if we actually did that!" 

Point Nine:  Lost posed a lot of really big questions relating to ideas like good versus evil, science versus faith, and life after death. Did TPTB think it successfully answered any of them? 

"I think those are ultimately non-answerable questions and I think we tried to always be ambitious in our storytelling. We decided the worst thing we could do would be to play it safe. The show had become successful because we had made bold storytelling decisions and we had to continue to make them. We knew that some of these decisions would lead to a polarization among the fans. When you tackle unanswerable questions like "What is the nature of existence? What happens after you die? What is the meaning of our lives?" there are not empirical answers, but we tried to show how our characters were wrestling with those questions," Cuse said.

"When you talk about something like faith and science on a meta level, it doesn't matter what the show said. When the show ends there are still all these questions that are going to exist. Is there always a scientific explanation for everything in the natural world? Is there a God? The show isn't going to be able to answer that. But we were pretty clear and explicit in our storytelling as the show went on that we were committed to what would be defined as supernatural explanations for things versus natural explanations," Lindelof said.

Point Ten: The literary references, images of classic books on the show and music used on the shows had nothing to do with understanding Lost. Even if fans would digest all that literature or music,  it might give you some answers to your life. But it would not give you the answers to Lost. 

Point Eleven: TPTB's favorite episode was "The Constant."