Watching Lost

The team of Lindelof and Cruise, the people behind the series, has hinted quite a few more information in this interview with UGO.

UGO: What episodes have you guys written so far?CARLTON CUSE: We’re working on 11, 10, and 9 sort of all simultaneously; we’ve got those 3 out of 5 in the works.

UGO: With the new schedule is the finale going to be a one hour episode or will it be two hours?DAMON: We are writing it as a two hour but they want to air it as two different hours because on May 22nd, which is essentially the last day of the season, they have a two hour Grey’s [Anatomy] finale which going to run from 8 to 10, and that is only going to leave an hour for us. It’s going to be designed as all of our finales have been, but not unlike the Lost pilot, which was written a two hours and aired as two separate hours , that is what they are going to do.

UGO: Who does episode 9 belong to? Is that something you want to talk about just yet?

CARLTON: That’s… something we don’t want to spill the beans on just yet.

DAMON: You’ll find out, I’m sure, in record time. Considering it’s not even on the air until April 24th, that’s a long time from now… six weeks away.

UGO: How did you feel about the change with the schedule? Setting 8 out as part of the second group of episodes, then pulling it back. During the strike, it was said that 8 was not a good place to leave things.

CARLTON: I don’t think that’s really true. I think what we thought was a bad thing was if we didn’t get a chance to come back and complete the season. The concern was really that if they only aired 8 episodes and the strike went on for a long time and let’s say there was another seven or eight months before we came back on the air, the season was going to feel very complete. The important thing is that the 5 hours of the show we have left to write are really going to allow us to end the season and sort of finish the season the way we wanted to. Some of the storylines are going to have to be pushed off into season five, some details about the freighter folk for instance, but we’re going to get a chance to complete the season. Our concern was really just leaving the season open, not that we didn’t like episode 8. I think we both feel like episode 8 is a pretty strong episode, and one that is kind of revelatory. Certain episodes are more revelatory about the mythology of the show, and it falls into that category.

DAMON: It’s just a little outside of the box of a normal episode of Lost in that it is intensely character focused on one person as opposed to the whole ensemble and as Carlton says it is a little more focused on filling in blanks as opposed to answering new questions. So it might have been a nice episode to come back to as opposed to go off on. That being said, the last scene in the show we would certainly define as a cliff hanger and really nicely platforms what episode nine is going to be. All things being equal, we’re happy we’re going out on episode 8.

UGO: Are we ever going to see on island flash forwards?

CARLTON: I don’t think we’ll rule out anything…

DAMON: Who’s to say you haven’t already?

UGO: Aha. Well that raises an interesting question, because some fans think that some of the flashes prior to “Through the Looking Glass” may have been flashforwards.

CARLTON: The show is a giant mosaic, and where you stand is sort of the answer to that question. At various points in the journey you’re going to be standing in various spots and you can define them as past, present, or future. We like fractured story telling, and the way we’re going you’ll be looking at various aspects of our characters’ lives in the story we are telling. We want to explore that from various perspectives.

UGO: When was the decision to use time travel in the story made?

DAMON: It’s been in the DNA of the show since the very beginning. Obviously, one thing the flash backs and the flash forwards provide you with is the idea of time travel. You’re bouncing around in time and events from the past are seemingly influencing the present, but it’s not a traditional time travel story until we started talking about what the hatch was there for, and what this electromagnetic energy that the hatch is trying to contain is and what would be the effect of that hatch going away, otherwise known as the purple sky event. And it was sort of those conversations which obviously happened way back in season one when Locke and Boone found the hatch that were the early precursors of time travel. I will say, though, that the first significant event in the show where we were thinking in the back of our minds that this is going to require a story telling element that isn’t traditional narrative, is the discovery of Adam and Eve in the caves.

The complete interview is found here.

Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cruise, Lost, Lost Season 4