In the Conclusion of Our Three-Part Interview, Lindelof and Cuse Reveal Details of Upcoming Episodes and Explain Why Lost Has to End
"What's season two [of Heroes] going to be? It's going to be entirely different is all I can tell you. They'll need a hatch!" -- Damon Lindelof
MediaVillage: With all the ongoing flashback stories, do you ever feel as if you're writing 25 shows at once?
Damon Lindelof: Absolutely. Two weeks ago we were breaking a Locke story. His flashback stories have a very distinctive feel to them. And then after that we did a concept episode with Nikki and Paulo, which is not unlike The Other 48 Days. [Days was an episode in
season two that efficiently recapped the experiences of the previously unseen crash victims from the tail section of the plane during the seven weeks they had been on the island as of that time.] It allowed us to think outside the box in terms of what an episode of Lost looked like. We felt [the Nikki and Paulo episode] was amazingly satisfying in terms of paying off what seemingly looks like a mistake in the first six episodes. Then we broke a Kate episode, and when you do Kate episodes you're literally writing the show The Fugitive. Her flashback stories have an entirely different sort of vernacular feel to them.
Carlton Cuse: Lost is a really hard show to write because there are all sorts of different tonalities. You look at shows like the CSI franchise. There's such an immense continuity to the way they are written. It's hard to succeed as a writer on our show but if you do it's incredibly
rewarding. You get to do a lot of different stuff. We have a Hurley episode coming up which is pretty much flat out comedy. If you were to compare episode six and seven with episode ten you'd go, "My God, these things are in a different bandwidth entirely." And yet that's what's fun for us, that we can tell all those different kinds of stories on our show.
MV: As you know, fans and critics don't always agree with some of the story turns you take.
DL: A really interesting issue is one that creates Democrats and Republicans around it. A really boring issue is one where everyone is unified and the answer is clear. The audience would never be surprised by our
show if it were completely obvious as to how to proceed. They would just watch it every week and go, "That was pretty much what I was expecting." With [NBC's] Heroes, season one is all about the discovery of their powers and [the characters] beginning to be intertwined in the sense that their destiny is to save the world. But what's season two going to be? It's going to be entirely different is all I can tell you, because in the finale this season they will save the world. They can never again do the story where the cheerleader realizes that her dad
adopted her and he's a bad guy. They can never again do the story about the stripper discovering the fact that she is actually a dual personality. The show has to become something different. They'll need a hatch! And it better be good, or else they're going to become victims of the same sort of rumbling [we're getting]. We were untouchable in season one because it was so interesting to just come along on the journey.
CC: In the first year all of the stories were so compelling because [fans] were so curious to know anything about these characters. That's one of the reasons why Lost has to end, because we can't sit around
and envision, "What is the flashback for Jack in year nine?" It doesn't realistically exist.
DL: (Laughs) He starts flashing back to what happened on the island in season one.
Carlton Cuse
(Editor's note: During a press conference at the January Television Critics Association tour in Los Angeles, Cuse told reporters, "One of the things we're in discussions with [ABC] about is picking an end
point to the show. It's always been discussed that the show would have a beginning, middle and end.")
CC: There is an intersection between our plans and viewing the show as an organic entity. That's what I think is most rewarding for us as writers and producers.
MV: I'm interested in the fact that Michael Emerson [the actor who plays Ben] was originally contracted for only
three episodes. Now, I can't imagine seasons two and three without him. You've done so much with Ben it's hard for me to imagine that he wasn't a huge character in your initial plan.
CC: We knew that we were going to catch an Other and that he was going to be a prisoner of war in the hatch.
DL: And that he was going to pretend to not be an Other and then he would be revealed as an Other and then he would escape. That was the three-episode arc.
CC: There was another germ which was, it would be cool if once he's escaped we realized he was the ostensible leader of the Others. Then you cast somebody, but you have a safety valve: If the actor isn't great you don't have to play all those cards. That doesn't mean we don't know there is a leader of the
Others and that he has a role in the story. It's just that in this particular circumstance Michael Emerson was so great that after he did the first couple of episodes we were just so engaged as writers we wanted to write more and more and more for him. That's the part of running a television series that I think is the most satisfying because you're doing it in response to what you're seeing
on film. You write to relationships. In season one we had a similar thing. We were going to make Michael and Jin enemies but they got along so well and there was so much chemistry between them we threw that idea out. We decided to buddy them up and they became pals on the whole raft project. I think you have to listen to what the show is telling you as you try to guide it. One of the
things that has been weird about this season is, because [of the three-month break] we've made a lot of episodes without audience feedback [to ongoing storylines]. We've had to do it completely based on our judgment.
MV: When something or someone in the story grows so unexpectedly and beneficially it also takes up a lot of story time. Does it
displace or delay other stories you had intended to get to sooner?
Damon Lindelof
CC: It's the dinner metaphor: You buy seven things and then you only can eat one. We ended up as writers getting really engaged in the story of the Others and Ben. That came at the expense of some of the other
characters like Sun and Jin and Claire who have had less to do because we've been telling that story. The book of Lost for season three is Our Characters vs. the Others. That's really what the season's about. It sort of necessitated having less stuff for those other guys to do.
DL: I honestly believe that if we had Jack, Kate and Sawyer get abducted by these people and had done less story time with them everybody would be grumbling about the fact that we still know nothing about the Others. "We don't know why they took Jack, Kate and Sawyer. Why are you spending time
on the beach camp with people arguing about the diminishing food supply when we want to be closest to the story at the center?" The reality is when we had Henry Gale [now Ben] down in the hatch he was the most interesting thing happening on the island. So as writers you want to write to that. It doesn't mean there aren't cool character stories happening between the cracks, but certain
characters like Jack or Kate or Sawyer or Locke or Sayid gravitate towards conflict and other characters like Hurley or Claire or Charlie or Sun or Jin don't.
MV: A lot has been written in recent months about ongoing concerns or complaints from fans. What are the positive things viewers
come back with over and over again? Is there anything that surprises the two of you?
CC: I think people are really engaged by Ben and Juliet. I think people love to hate Ben so there's this sense of, "When is he going to die? What's going to happen to him?" And the mystery of whether Juliet is good or
bad is something else that I think people are really engaged in. We've heard a lot of good feedback about that.
DL: It always comes down to the characters. With people who love the show, the feedback always takes the form of, "I love Sawyer. Don't do anything to Sawyer." Or, "I love Desmond." The fact that people
still think of the show in terms of, "It's a Jack episode. It's a Juliet episode. It's a Ben episode." is very cool, because that tells us we're still character centric.
To see a "leak" of the final Lost episode thanks to Robert Iger, President and CEO of The Walt Disney Company at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and TVSeriesFinale.com click here.
Click to read part 1 of the Lost interview.
Click to read part 2 of the Lost interview.
