When the Lost finale aired on May 23, , it was a very big deal. It was also, quite possibly, the last big deal of its kind. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, then fleshed out over six seasons into a character-driven, mythologically rich, Emmy-winning existential adventure, the island-based drama had become one of the biggest pop-cultural obsessions in the world by the end of the aughts. When the finale aired, it sparked divided responses understatement from fans.
Still others came away from it all convinced that the castaways had been dead the whole time. They were not dead. What was semi-clear at the time and is even clearer now is that the broadcast of the Lost finale would mark the end of something else: the truly communal broadcast television experience. But nothing else since has felt so massively anticipated and so widely consumed in real time the way that the end of Lost , the Smoke Monster Super Bowl, did in Because, yes, of course, we had to go back.
But we needed to know [when we would end]. It was impossible to move forward without a clear sense of what the rest of the journey was. The best we could do was get six seasons. At least we were able to end the show on our own timetable. Liz Sarnoff, writer and executive producer: The first three seasons, we did so many episodes. I mean, we did like 22 to 25 a season. It was more like, What are we shooting next week? But there were certain images I know that Damon always had [in mind for the last episode] in the beginning.
It was early. Eddy Kitsis, writer and executive producer: I feel like we also had the Vincent component. Lindelof: There were certain things that we were already guided by and locked in on.
The idea that the island was a cork, like literally stopping up hell — we were all Buffy fans, particularly in the season when Goddard and Fury were hanging around quite a bit. We did refer to the island as being a cork in the hellmouth. By the time Jacob explains that to Richard Alpert in the final season, that was an idea that was there for a very long time. Pretend I never said anything. So I quit my theorizing right there. Lindelof: The idea that the island was moving was one of the crazy ideas that J.
Certainly once we had the [writers] room together in season one, I remember having those conversations, because Carlton was pitching it in terms of, like, constellations or something like that. We all always loved the idea and wanted to keep it as a secret. Someone is basically talking to him. Aloha to Lost , the post-finale special: Those motherfuckers, J.
I was constantly pestering them to know what was happening. We will tell you how the series ends. And then you can decide whether you want to open it or not.
To this day, they swear they were going to write the ending down, put it in the envelope, and leave it to me to decide whether I wanted to open it or not. Damon and I went to the Tate Modern, and we decided to walk back [to our hotel]. Lindelof: Yes, that is true. Over a two-week period in the spring of , the Lost writing staff gathered, as a group and in individual writing sessions, to craft the final episode.
It was even more intense with Los t because everybody realized that it was such a significant thing and would probably be a huge demarcation point in all of our careers. Sarnoff: Our feelings about the finale were always, always , that it was going to have to be very emotional and character-based because we found when we gave answers to mysteries and stuff like that, the audience would normally reject them.
Mystery shows like that are so tricky because nobody wants the mystery to end, but they want answers. Cuse: I remember very clearly just trying to stick to the same process that had gotten us to the th and st episode. Lindelof: I spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to figure out if there was a way to get Walt into the finale, other than being in the church.
He looks so different than he did in the pilot, and everybody else in the church kind of looks like they did in season one. Cuse: Malcolm [David Kelley] grew up so we had to figure out how to make that work in the context of our story.
It was a conundrum trying to figure out how we could bring that character back, but it felt like a missing piece to not do that given what happened to him. Cuse: There was no way to answer all the open questions that existed across the prior episodes of the show. In fact, an attempt to do that would just be didactic. That was sort of what answers look like. Lindelof: I spend a lot of time really anxious about whether or not something was good or whether or not people were going to like it.
I also got cancer in season four of the show, and it was an experience that brought us all very close. So it had been an intense time in the last couple of seasons, and it was hard not to be aware of how much the show meant to us but also how much it meant to other people. I was like, Of course. And he sent us that Christian scene [with Jack in the church], the first draft, like literally right after he wrote it, just to see what we thought.
Adam Horowitz, writer and executive producer: I remember feeling, Wow, this is it. And it was beautiful. Note: That did not always work!
But the details surrounding the finale were in such demand that they were guarded with extra intensity. Holloway: We were all so anxious to get the last script because we were like, How are they going to get out of it?
Michael Emerson Benjamin Linus : That last script was a high-security script. When you got pages, which were usually the day you worked, they were printed on red paper, which is unreproducible. This was especially high stakes. This could not get out into the world. Maggie Grace Shannon Rutherford : They really enjoyed the spy games of getting people scripts. It was early then, before Marvel took it to another level of paranoia.
I had to even purchase a special mailbox that had a lock on it so that they would be able to leave the scripts for me. We just kinda strapped it to a bench in front of my house.
If someone really wanted, they could easily just steal the whole mailbox. Yunjin Kim Sun : I got the script, but it was thinner than I expected.
A lot of the scenes that I was not involved in were missing. But it was like that the last five or six episodes. Due to — Writers Guild of America strike, the fourth season featured 14 episodes, and season 5 had 17 episodes. Season Six centered around the consequences of the detonation of the hydrogen bomb, in an attempt to change the past. Lost started out as a series about a group of castaways stuck on a mysterious island.
Throughout the 6 seasons it veered off in a lot of different directions. The final season was really about telling the backstory of the island, and revealing the fates of the characters.
Watch options. Storyline Edit. The past, present, and future lives of surviving Oceanic Flight passengers are dramatically intertwined as a fight for survival ensues in a quest for answers after crashlanding on a mysterious island.
Each discovery prompts yet more secrets, as the hastily-formed colony search for a way off the island, or is this their home? They're not the survivors they think they are. Season Two. Did you know Edit. Trivia The character of Sawyer was originally meant to be an older, slick, suit-wearing city con artist from Buffalo, NY.
However, when Josh Holloway forgot a line at his audition and subsequently kicked a chair in frustration and loudly swore, the writers liked the edge he brought to the Sawyer character and decided to write Sawyer as more of a Southern, darker drifter instead.
Goofs At the auction for the captain's journal of the "Black Rock" the auctioneer says it sailed and disappeared in , 20 years before Alfred Nobel applied for his patent for dynamite. Yet the ship supplied dynamite through the series. Quotes [repeated line] Desmond Hume : See you in another life, brother. Crazy credits The strange opening credits were designed by J. Abrams on his laptop in black and white as an homage to The Twilight Zone.
Connections Edited into Lost: The Journey User reviews 1. Top review. Restored what little faith I have in TV. With so many high-quality shows ending or getting cancelled recently Friends, Frasier, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel , and with the decline in quality of many others The West Wing, Smallville , not to mention the egregious rise of turgid and tasteless "reality" programming, I'd just about written off TV as an entertainment medium.
I was seriously considering ditching my TV and cable subscription in favour of my computer screen and broadband Internet connection. Then along comes "Lost". I missed the first few episodes, but was able to catch up thanks to BitTorrent. Now I'm hooked. One of the things they thought might have been the reason was that, after it ended, during the closing credits — in the US, at least — they had some B-roll of the original crash site, which was just kind of meant as a thing for people to sit and decompress with as they watched the closing credits.
Sam Anderson: We all saw it for the first time at the wrap party. Everybody was there, and it was just rapturous to watch. But when we got to the end of it, all of a sudden they started running the wreckage of the plane over the credits. We believed the network added it just as something to show the credits with, and that in itself made people think we had been dead from the very beginning.
They were all dead! Sam Anderson: A good buddy of mine was just so furious at me. I believe — and I feel like Damon and Carlton told me this — that whatever happened on the island really did happen. Then Ben [Michael Emerson] and Hurley stayed and ran the island. When that plane took off, all those people really did get off. A large number of fans were also seemingly left angry by the lack of answers given in the finale.
But I also think that there is nobility in the exploration and the journey of these ideas. I think the journey of Lost , like life, has its flaws and blemishes, which may be perceived differently by different people.
I was personally along for the emotional ride — that was what hooked me. I remember talking to Carlton about the show, and he said that Lost was a wonderful way to do character work. Having said that, I understand how people would want more answers. Rebecca Mader: I think the people that loved it are people who are driven by the character development. I think they left a lot up to interpretation. Rebecca Mader: I found the finale so moving. It made me cry for hours, but I was also grieving this massive important chapter in my life, because Lost changed everything for me and it was suddenly over.
It was a bit like a funeral. Henry Ian Cusick : I think a reboot would be really cool. I guess the obvious way would be Hurley and Benjamin Linus on the island. To come back to it in some other incarnation would be another gift.
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