'LOST' RETURNS
Ready for more?
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
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Only one group is more secretive than those resident bad guys on "Lost" — you know, the Others — and that would be the executive producers for the popular ABC mystery.
But with the show set to air new episodes tomorrow after a five-week hiatus, it turns out that Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof are not unlike a pair of grinning boys with secrets they're dying to tell.
So in typical "Lost" fashion, they dropped a few hints about this season's final episodes — the kind of hints that leave you with more questions than when you started — during a teleconference with journalists last week.
"We're excited about what is happening," Cuse said. "There are definitely some very large and seismic events that will happen to our castaways between now and the end of the season. And by the end of the season, some people's fates will be clear and others not so clear."
Fans of "Lost" won't be surprised by a vague statement like that. Through nearly four seasons, they've watched the show's plot twist and turn on itself as Cuse and Lindelof turned the drama about plane-crash survivors on a mysterious island into a TV cult.
The survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 — who have already encountered a smoke monster, the remnants of an elaborate hidden scientific outpost and the Others — opened this season thinking they were about to be rescued. New characters dropped in by helicopter from a freighter parked offshore, claiming to be there to save the castaways. But it turned out that Ben, the creepy leader of the Others, was actually the target.
Then viewers learned that the island's strange magic can bounce you back and forth through time. And it was revealed that six castaways — Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Sun and baby Aaron — somehow made it back to the "real" world, although with various emotional demons in tow.
So how do you top that? With the promise of even bigger events, Cuse and Lindelof said.
"We don't want to comment on any particular character's fate because we feel like that would spoil what happens on the show," Cuse said. "But suffice to say, there is a very compelling event involving Claire's character that will take place between now and the end of the season."
"All I can say is, Sawyer isn't one of the Oceanic Six and Jack and Kate are," Lindelof said. "It will obviously be a huge focus in the final three hours of the show."
THE PUPPET MASTERS
Cuse and Lindelof are the puppet masters of "Lost." They're the only ones who really know what's going to happen, and they view their creation, which is scheduled to end after two more seasons, as a huge mosaic.
"We are putting tiles in all over the mosaic, and when the mosaic is complete, 'Lost' will be complete," Cuse said. "And obviously we put tiles in the present and in the past, and with the flash-forwards, now we are putting them in the future. But it is entirely possible as we move into future seasons, that the notion of what is the past and what is the future and what is the present on the show could change."
The final month of episodes will cap a difficult season for the show's creators.
After stunning viewers last May when it was revealed that some of the castaways get off the island, fans were eager for the start of the fourth season. But filming for the Hawai'i-based show stalled when Hollywood writers went on strike in November. ABC was left with only eight completed episodes of a planned 16-episode season.
When the strike ended in February, the network scrambled to jump-start production in March, but not quickly enough to prevent a gap in the middle of the season.
BACK-UP PLAN
The producers had an eight-hour story plan that needed to be wedged into the remaining five air dates. Their solution was to add an hour to the final night, May 29, and defer two hours to future seasons.
The show's producers view each season as a lengthy narrative split roughly in two. The first half sets up dilemmas for the characters and the second half delivers resolutions.
The strike was frustrating because it stopped the creative process before the producers could resolve any of the problems they had created this season for their characters, Cuse said.
"But when we came back, we got a chance to fulfill all of our narrative desires, and so all the stuff set up in the first part of the season is going to pay off," he said.
The pace of production has been nothing less than frantic since filming resumed March 10. At one point last week, three different episodes were being filmed at the same time. And the script for the season finale was being revised. But no one feels any pressure to top last season's flash-forward finale, something Lindelof said was a "one-time-only opportunity."
Lindelof said, "We purposely presented this story in a more accessible way so that it's more about what happens as opposed to some sort of smoke and mirrors that we are trying to employ."
Their intention is to keep fans on their toes and keep them guessing all the way to the start of Season 5 in January, Lindelof said. "If we do our jobs right in the finale, in the eight months between the finale and the season premiere, the audience will once again be asking: 'What the hell are they going to do?' "
Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.
