Nobody has to explain the importance of endings to Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, executive producers of “Lost.”
Fans of the show have been speculating not only about what will happen in the final season, which begins Tuesday, but about the last frame of the series finale, which will air in May.
“We keep getting asked about the final image and we’re like, ‘Yeah, sure, we know what it is,'” Lindelof said, “but people are acting like the final image of the show is revelatory in some way, as opposed to maybe (what’s revelatory) is what happens in the first hour of the finale.”
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During an hourlong December interview on the Disney-ABC lot in Burbank, Cuse and Lindelof displayed the self-deprecating wit and improvisational banter that fans have come to know in countless interviews, podcasts, DVD commentaries and convention appearances. They’re both skilled conversationalists and share a palpable affection for each other, but they disagree just enough to keep things interesting.
Perhaps they have such a strong bond with “Lost” obsessives because Cuse and Lindelof, who are 50 and, 36 respectively, are pop culture junkies. During the interview, the endings of “The Sopranos” and “Battlestar Galactica” were analyzed, and there were mentions of everything from Harry Potter to Don Johnson to “FlashForward” and “Twin Peaks.”
Not to mention Ewoks.
That particular digression was vintage Cuselof (or “Darlton,” if you prefer that nickname for the pair). Their discussion of whether singing Ewoks — the final image of the old-school “Star Wars” trilogy — helped or harmed that franchise was highly entertaining, but it also had a serious point.
Not surprisingly, Cuse’s and Lindelof’s positions on the matter are too complicated to sum up here, but one thing is clear: 1983, the year the furry little creatures made their debut in “Return of the Jedi,” is a galaxy far, far away.
Lindelof said, “I think the worst thing that’s happened in the blogosphere, in general, is that there’s this sense of needing to insulate yourself from being excited about something by saying, ‘I’m very skeptical about this.’ With ‘Avatar,’ for basically four months, (the conventional wisdom) has been, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be any good.’
“Back when I was a kid, before ‘Empire Strikes Back’ or ‘Return of the Jedi’ came out, when all you saw was the trailer and you didn’t have the Internet, it was basically like, ‘I just want this movie to be the greatest movie ever!’ What’s the matter with saying, ‘I want Season 6 of “Lost” to be the greatest season ever?’ But people won’t say it because it’s easier for them to approach it as, ‘It’s going to let me down.'”
Depending on whether the show’s countless online chroniclers and analyzers like Season 6 — which, Lindelof said, will employ a “new narrative device” — “we’ll be riding either a wave of goodwill into the finale — or bad will.”
The catch is, when Tuesday rolls around, they’ll already be writing the 15th episode of the 18-hour season. As Cuse put it, “There will be no time for course correction.”
Managing fans’ expectations for the final season of “Lost” is a tricky endeavor. Certainly, the network as well as the show’s creative team want “Lost” to go out with respectable ratings (overall, the show’s audience has declined about 30 percent from Season 1’s average of 15.7 million viewers a week). But they also cautioned that not every episode will contain massive twists and surprises, and not all questions are going to be answered.
“We feel that the story lines that ultimately will be the most satisfying are the character stories,” Cuse said. “We are very well aware that for people who are really focused on the mythology, it’s hard to provide probably completely sufficient answers for those groups of people, so there will probably be different levels of satisfaction, based on what it is that interested you about the show in the first place.”
Though it’s probably a good idea to temper expectations of the final season, the truth is, “Lost” already helped raise TV viewers’ expectations of what is possible on the small screen.
Sure, “Lost” hasn’t been perfect, but since it debuted in 2004, it has been that increasingly rare entity: a mainstream hit that enraptures the public, the media and genre communities. In this niche-ified culture, “Lost” has been broadly popular despite not being like anything else. Actually, it was popular because it wasn’t like anything else.
And now that the end is near, its creative gurus don’t want to do what the “Star Wars” prequel films did: deflate the magic of the story by explaining too much.
“We are very committed to this notion of not stripping the show of its essential mystery,” Cuse said. “Mystery exists in life, and we kind of always go back to the (‘Star Wars’ prequels). Your understanding of the Force was not aided by knowing that there were little particles swimming around in the bloodstreams of Jedi, so we’re trying to find the right blend of answering questions but also leaving the things that should be mysterious mysterious.”
The entire interview with the “Lost” creators is online at bit.ly/5twef6.
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