LOSTblog: New Interview: Damon & Carlton Talk about the End of LOST

Monday, December 7, 2009

New Interview: Damon & Carlton Talk about the End of LOST

TVGuide.com: At what point did you decide: We really need to set an end date for the series. And why?
Lindelof: For us, the primary belief in the first season of the show was that we would not be able to sustain this premise forever because that’s what the story tells you. If the story starts with a plane crashing on an island, the story’s going to end when the people get off the island, and for us, the process of keeping them from leaving the island was going to be very finite.

By early in the second season, we engaged in a series of dialogues with the network, saying, hey, these flashbacks are not going to last forever. Once we answer the seminal mysteries of what it is that Kate did or how Locke ended up in the wheelchair, why Hurley ended up in a mental institution, then that phase of the story is done and we have to move into the next phase of the story, which we knew was basically the flash-forwards and the story of the Oceanic 6. We didn’t pull the trigger until we were allowed to move to the inevitable conclusion.

We always did our best to make the show great, but when you’re halfway through Season 3 and you’re doing episodes about Jack flying a kite in Thailand, then the network finally said, “Oh, this is what you guys were talking about.” So we were able to agree upon how many episodes were left and at that point we knew exactly how much time we had to arrive at our destination.

TVGuide.com: Have you always known what the end of the series would be? Has it changed at all?
Cuse: Always is the operative word. We developed a mythology, as I said earlier, in the first season and between the first and the second season, and we’re actually moving toward that exact end point. I mean, that has not changed. Certain details of how the show ends have evolved over time but that’s mainly on a character level as we’ve gotten to know the characters and seen how the actors interact. So there are parts of the ending that are still living and breathing, but the actual mythological endpoint has been constant since we developed the show.

TVGuide.com: How do you respond to the criticism that people who were passionate about the show at the beginning have gotten “lost” along the way? Do you ever think: We’ve made things too complicated. We need to be simpler.

Cuse: In order to sustain a show over what ultimately will be 120 episodes, it has to be complex. If you took a non-Harry Potter viewer and asked them to watch the fourth or fifth movie, I think they’d be very confused about what’s going on. We feel like Season 5 was the highest degree of difficulty. We hope that a lot of viewers who left will come back for the end of the show. We tried to design the show with a certain circularity and we feel like Season 6 will be very much like Season 1 and while you do need to know backstories to follow what’s going on in Season 6, it’s very character-centric.

TVGuide.com: Did you ever think about syndication when you were creating the show, in that it’s so mythology-heavy?
Lindelof: I think at the time that Lost and Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy came along, serialized was a dirty word. But those shows basically proved that you could create a water-cooler zeitgeist around a show because it was serialized. To [ABC president] Steve McPherson’s credit, I think that there was a lot more focus on being successful while you were on the air, as opposed to thinking forward to what the possible syndication deals would be.

Fortunately for us at this time, the DVD television market was exploding. That provided a revenue stream for them that made up for the fact that the show probably wouldn’t [syndicate] well. But if you watch the first season of Lost, the heavy mythological elements were not really in play. There was character serialization, the romance, that kind of stuff, but in Season 1 it took them eight episodes to build a raft; in Season 5, they jump through time four times in a single episode. I don’t think we could’ve gotten away with that in Season 1, nor did we want to.