Lost Stuff

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Pretty interesting interview (I thought) with Team Darlton regarding last week's Lost

Some interesting (I thought) excerpts:

Damon Lindelof: It's never exactly the reaction you're expecting. We knew it would be an episode that would be divisive. We've been talking since the beginning of the season about the idea that the great thing of doing a show on your own terms is you have no excuses, but it's also slightly terrifying that if you're a mystery show, there will inevitably be episodes that answer mysteries. That has the potential to frighten, terrify, make people hate. This was going to be the season where we said, "Whatever your theory was, our presentation of the endgame of the show may disprove your theory, so we're sorry if you don't like the fact that you don't get the Man in Black's name, but you don't get it." So that's going to piss some people off, and it's their right to be pissed off.

One of the things I found interesting - and this is just me playing armchair psychologist - is that there's a lot of text and subtext in this episode about how much of Smokey's pain and the deaths it led to were caused by Mother's refusal to explain things and give him honest answers. And I'm wondering if that was intentional on a conscious or subconscious level - that perhaps after six years of doing this and seeing how angry people get when you don't tell them what they want to know, you've recognized the downside to that approach.

Carlton Cuse:We want the show to speak for itself. We don't want to offer up our interpretation of what the thematics are of the episode. But a lot of the things you say are very interesting. But we will say this: This is what an episode of "Lost" that is about answering questions looks like. This thing is a big mythological download. Our belief is that the real resolution of the show and the one that matters is what happens to these characters. We've felt a desire to provide the audience with Jacob and the Man in Black's origin story and make it not the last episode of the show for a very good reason. The show is going to focus on these characters. That's what we believe is more important and that's what we believe the audience wants to see. This all worked the way we wanted to. We planned it out so we could do a big mythological download episode at this point so that it would allow us to have the end of the show be more character-centric. That's the way we chose to tell our story.

Last week, when you spoke to Jeff Jensen, you said all of the deaths happened so you could establish Smokey's bonafides as a bad guy, and to make it clear he's not on the side of our characters. And in that episode we were clearly meant to side with Jack as the newfound man of faith. But in "Across the Sea," it's Man in Black, who's the man of science, who winds up being the more sympathetic character, and the victim of his upbringing. So is it supposed to be black and white like the backgammon pieces, or is still supposed to be more complex in the war between the two sides.

DL: We have long sort of spoken about the interesting dynamic in the show is nobody is 100 percent good, nobody is 100 percent evil. Everybody has the capacity for both. Every time you come up with an explanation that's black and white, it turns into shades of grey. Ben Linus starts as a villain and then can become sympathetic. Sawyer and Jin who were also first presented in less than sympathetic lights became increasingly more sympathetic. We wanted to explain why the Man in Black had behaved the way that he does, and to show that like a lot of other characters on the show, he's the victim of very bad parenting. To reduce him to just a supernatural force, as opposed to a person, was not our intent. "Across the Sea" was our attempt to say, "Here's why Jacob feels the way he does about people, why the Man in Black feels the way he does about people," and a bit about their childhood. It's as simple as that and as complex as the themes of the show are.

When Mother slaughters the people in the human village, the iconography looked very much like the Dharma bunkers after the purge. Was this your way of suggesting why it was Jacob might have allowed The Others to slaughter the Dharma folk - that this is the punishment for anyone who gets too close to unlocking the island's secrets?

DL: In terms of what Jacob allowed, what he didn't allow, what The Others did of their own volition, with Ben basically saying "This came down from Jacob" is all in the area that is subject to interpretation purposely. What our intention was is that there is a repeating vicious cycle that seems to happen on this island, where people come to the island, they try to figure out what makes the island work, and the closer they came leads them to their own inevitable demise.

CC: Like Icarus

DL: The more curious you become about why the island has its properties, inevitably the protector of the island feels the need to engage in some form of mass genocide. It was more our attempt to say that history repeats itself, and this is an ongoing and continuing motif.

Getting back to Adam and Eve for a second, can you talk me through the thought process of including that flashback to "House of the Rising Sun." Was there ever a thought of not having it in there and hoping the viewer could fill in the blanks, or did you just feel that the skeletons were too obscure a mystery to not have that extra context?

DL: The reason that we put it in certainly wasn't because we thought it was too obscure and we wanted to hit people over the heads with it. It was more a matter of, here's an episode where our characters don't appear in it at all, and we wanted to make it clear to the audience that this little family drama, this dysfunctional relationship between these three people is really responsible for everything that's happening to the passengers of Oceanic 815. We wanted to illustrate that by, at the very end of the show saying, "Oh, right, Jack and Kate and Locke are affected by the fact that Mother decided to raise her kids this way, and Jacob ended up bringing these people to the island." The idea was to say that this chapter of the series is significant to the story we've been telling you, and that the series is about the survivors of Oceanic 815.

The sideways universe, it seems as if those stories have also been used to illustrate that point. We see a Jack who hasn't been through everything on the island, a Locke who behaves differently, other characters reverting to a season one mode. Was that by design?

DL: Everything is by design. Unfortunately, when you ask that question, if you're not a believer, you say, "They're making it up as they go along," and if you are a believer, you say, "It's all part of a design." It's lose-lose for us, because you think we're just lying if we say everything was by design. I do feel that hopefully the conversation about the sideways will be a different conversation when the series is over than it is now. We knew going into it that the sideways would be a very polarizing form of storytelling. But as Carlton reiterated earlier, we're doing the best version of ours that we know how. We understand that you can't please all the people all the time, that's the kind of show that "Lost" is. (more on this in the linked interview)

And I should say I was not challenging the whole plan/not-plan issue with that question. What I meant was, was one of the purposes of the sideways a chance to, before we get to the end, revisit these characters in a state similar to how they were before the plane crashed?

CC: The answer to that question is yes. We wanted there to be a symmetry to the show from the first season to the last season. In the first season, the show was very character-centric, and one of the great revelations was discovering who these people were. It's revelatory when you learn Kate is a fugitive and Sawyer's a con man and Hurley's a lottery winner. We wanted to have that same sense of revelation be a part of the final season. We wanted to bring the show back around to the characters and give a sense of this journey kind of coming full circle. We felt the sideways were a good narrative device to do that. You'll see in the end how the narrative closes. It's always how we saw the show working out, and we stand by it.

B>You've talked about the idea that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't, and you can't please everybody. But how much of a sense of responsibility do you feel you have - that the ending has - to the legacy of the show? There are some people who say, "Oh, if I don't like the ending, this has all been a big waste of time," and others who say they still will enjoy what they watched until then, and then others who say that if you don't stick the landing, they're never going to watch another show like "Lost" for fear of being strung along again.

DL: There are people who are in relationships with loved ones and then that relationship ends horribly and they say I'm never going to fall in love again. Different people have different reactions. There are shows like "Seinfeld" where one guy says the "Seinfeld" finale wasn't a great finale, but it doesn't make it not be a great series, because it's a sitcom. "Battlestar" was one where the vocal fanbase said the finale affected in hindsight their entire experience of the show. The day after the finale ends, and the month after the finale ends, people are going to be talking about the finale. Hopefully a year or two or three or five years down the line, people are talking about the series as a whole. Certainly, that perception will be colored by whether or not they liked the finale, and newbies may be less likely to try the show if the zeitgeist says, "The last episode of 'Lost' was so bad that it made every episode that preceded it terrible." That's going to have an affect, but who are we to say what people are going to think?