By Christina Radish
When the producers of a television show are as secretive as the ones for the ABC smash hit Lost, it leaves fans and the media on a constant quest to find out what could happen next. As the unexpected twists and turns have played out over the last two seasons, viewers have kept coming back for more.
Now in its third season, Lost has all new secrets to explore, including the four-toed statue, discovered on the island at the end of last season. Often vague in their answers, executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse speak with MediaBlvd Magazine, revealing a few hints about what viewers can expect when they tune into the new season.
MediaBlvd.> What can you say about season 3?
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Lost Creator and Executive Producer Damon Lindelof- Photo courtesy Lostpedia.com |
Damon Lindelof> One of the things that’s really cool to us about season 3 is that we’re not going to have re-runs this year. That was the big frustration, both from us, creatively and the fans. We feel like we’ve all arrived at a compromise that’s going to be awesome and, as a result, the downside is that there’s going to be 13 weeks with no Lost. But, we’re designing a mini-season that’s going to run all the way through the middle of November with six consecutive episodes, which tell a self-contained story with its own mini-cliffhanger, so that when we come back in February and run the remaining 16 episodes, it should be fairly cool. We all sat down and worked out the entire season, right when we finished season 2. We didn’t even break. All the writers went down to Hawaii and we basically figured out what the tent poles of the season were going to be, the first of which ends at the end of episode six, in which a tremendous amount of stuff is going to be happening.
Carlton Cuse> Season 3 is going to focus a lot more on The Others. It’s going to be very different in feel from season 2, which was really about the hatch. It will be through our characters’ interaction with The Others that we will come to know a little bit more about who they are, what their society is like, what their mission is, where they came from, who leads and who comprises their society. There will be a lot of action-adventure and definitely more romance this year.
MB> Can you talk in a general way about where the new season will be going? Have you patterned the story to fit with your new broadcast schedule?
Carlton> Yeah, totally. We’ve designed two seasons for season 3. The first is a six-episode mini-series, which will pick up all the dangling threads from the finale. We’ll blast through six episodes and then end up with another cliff-hanger. It will be a first chapter resolution, and then we’ll be back with 16 or 17 straight episodes in the spring. We’re very excited about this because when Lost is on, and when it’s not on, it’s not on. The fans won’t be confused, and they won’t be frustrated by going weeks and weeks without new episodes. We actually think that this scheduling plan is going to give us a chance to do some more interesting things on a storytelling level. Before we started season 2, Damon and I spent three weeks with all the writers and we mapped out season 3. We create the architectural super-structure of the season, and then we write the episodes week to week, so there’s flexibility there. Last year, for instance, Henry Gale was supposed to be in two episodes of the show, but he ended up being in eight because we loved what the actor did. Michelle Rodriguez was, initially, going to be a love interest for Jack, but we just didn’t find enough chemistry there to promote that. You have to have a plan, but you also have to listen to what the show tells you, and write adaptively to that.
Damon> I think one of the cool things about Lost is that every season is its own pilot. When season 2 opened up, we had to be very purposely vague about the storytelling we were going to do because everything was hung on what we were going to find in the hatch. The reality was, the reason that we held it back in season 1 was we wanted the reveal to be so big that, essentially, we did 24 hours of the show last year where they were pushing a button on a computer and occasionally washing their clothes down there, and waiting 24 hours for the resolution of the question that we posed in the pilot for the second season premiere, which was “What happens if you don’t push this button?” We don’t really even fundamentally understand that is the question until the end of the third episode. Here, we’re doing something very similar, which is, people really don’t know what season 3 is going to be yet. We know what the situation going into it is -- that Jack, Kate and Sawyer are in captivity. We don’t know why they’ve been taken. But, the big, fundamental, “What’s in the hatch?,” question we feel we want to be addressing in season three is Who are these other people? What are they doing on the island? Why have they been taking us? Why did they take Walt? What’s their story? And, by the end of season 3 -- in much the same way that by the end of season 2, you knew the story of the hatch, what was in it, who was in it, why it existed, what it’s purpose was and it’s role in the crash of 815 -- people will have the same level of comprehension for The Others. And then, the doors will be blown off the show, in a really fundamental way -- a way that we’ve started sending up in our finale in season 2 and will begin to creep its way back into the show again.
MB> You changed the structure of season 2 with the tail survivors, when you focused on that. Do you plan on doing a lot of different structural narrative with The Others, to be able to tell their backstory and have episodes that just focus on them?
Damon> The rule, as you will start to see it establish itself, is that the show is still about our people. We don’t want to start handing off the show to strangers, until the show is ready for that, so we’re going to be, very much, with Kate, Jack and Sawyer as they’re having their experience. Point-of-view is a big part of Lost, and we tried to do the same thing with the tail section people. You didn’t really learn their story until the other 48 days, which was seven episodes in. Otherwise, they were just people interacting with Sawyer, Michael and Jin. The Others have a much more involved history than just having crash-landed on the other side of the island for a couple weeks. I think baby steps are the way to go.
MB> Is the intention to humanize The Others and make viewers like them more, or just understand them more?
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Lost Executive Producer Carlton Cuse- Photo courtesy LostPedia.com |
Carlton> Like everything on Lost, your initial expectations are often confounded. Whatever you are thinking about The Others right now, we can pretty much assure you, you won’t be thinking the same thing by the end of the season.
Damon> A lot of people have the wrong assumption about who these people are, how long they’ve been on the island, and where they came from. Just like every other character on the show, I’d be very interested to see what a Henry Gale flashback looked like. You introduce a character in a very conflict-ridden scenario, where you see them at their worst, but then gradually you begin to see things from their side of it. That’s always been the plan on the show. Going into season 2, the big question was, “What’s in the hatch?” And, we feel, going into season 3, the big question is, “Who are these Other people on the island and why did they take Jake, Kate and Sawyer? Why do they want those three?”
MB> There were some new mysteries introduced in the finale, like with the statue’s foot. Do you have a plan for when you’ll reveal things like that?
Carlton> We do have a plan for that. To announce a timeline would just do us a disservice. Sometimes, that timeline shifts back and forth. I’m not sure how quickly we’re going to get to some of that stuff. There are dangling mysteries. Our plan is as it has always been. We try to answer some questions and introduce new mysteries.
MB> Will Michael and Walt still be a part of the show?
Damon> Yes. Will they be a part of season 3? I don’t want to comment on that. But, I think it would be fairly unfulfilling to never see or hear from those characters again, after seeing them sail off in that boat.
MB> How involved is J.J. Abrams going to be this year?
Damon> J.J.’s been pretty involved, coming out of the gate. He was still doing publicity for Mission: Impossible 3 as we started breaking out the season-long arcs, but he and I wrote the season premiere together, and he has plans to direct the seventh episode of the show, which would be the season premiere for the second block of episodes. He’s very much in the loop of everything that Carlton and I, and the other writers, are doing.
MB> Are you still thinking about building it towards a definite end?
Carlton> We have an end point to the show. The problem is, we don’t know when we’re going to get there. We work in a network television environment where, as long as the show is successful, ABC is rightfully in charge. It’s their job to make as much money off the show as they can. After four or five seasons, we would love to say, “Okay, the show is over,” like JK Rowling said, “There are going to be seven Harry Potter books,” and everyone has that comfort of knowing that her story is arriving at a conclusion. We’re working in an open-ended environment, and that’s really challenging. We have a set amount of mythology, but we don’t know how long that has to play over. All we can do is encourage people to enjoy the journey and not worry so much about the destination. That’s what we have to do too because, if we start thinking about the destination, it freaks us out. We don’t know where that is.
MB> When you feel like you know the destination is right ahead of you, will you tell the network to close it out?
Damon> The reality is that, right now, we have the benefit of staying according to the original plan. The metaphor we always use is that you’re driving from New York to L.A. We’re perfectly on course with where we are, on our way to L.A., but there will reach a point in our storytelling where we’re going to go, “Oh, wow! We actually have to circle back and do a couple loop-de-loops, or we’re going to get there too soon.” Once that happens for us, creatively, we’re going to disconnect from the show. We don’t want to stall anymore than the audience wants us to stall. Fortunately, we’ve designed at least four seasons, potentially five, before we get to that point where it’s like, “Now, we’re making stuff up as we go along,” although the audience often accuses us of that. There has to be an improvisational quality to television, or it wouldn’t be good.
Carlton> If we forced the storytelling, you would feel worse. Henry Gale was going to be in two episodes and the actor was so awesome that we ended up having him be in eight. But, the plan to discover a prisoner in the hatch and then have him turn out to be a significant member of The Others was always in play.
Damon> And, you can’t write chemistry. From the word go, Michelle Rodriguez’s arc was always going to end in her dying at the end of season 2, but we were talking about her as being a love interest for Matthew Fox’s character. Then, in their scenes together, those sparks never really happened, so we just had them be army buddies. We cut bait on that storyline because you can’t write chemistry.
Carlton> You have to listen to what the show tells you it wants to do.
MB> Star Wars went through a period where it was incredibly popular, and now that’s starting to level off. Are you concerned with how popular Lost is and how bright it’s burning, and trying to maintain that brightness?
Carlton> You can’t do anything about that. We’ve had a really long run at the top of the popular Zeitgeist. That part’s out of our control. Yes, new things will come along. Clearly, this year, Grey’s Anatomy is burning a lot brighter in the popular culture light than Lost is. All we can do is try to make the show as good as we can make it, and we recognize that we are not destined to be at the forefront of popular culture with the show for an indefinite period of time.
Damon> It’s also hard to compare the two because Star Wars is a movie. Even when the original trilogy came out, you’d have three years between movies, and you’re essentially talking about 7 or 7 ½ hours of film. We’ve done 49 hours of Lost now, in just under two years, so the intensity at which the show burns fuel is much faster, and the audiences predilection to turn on it happens quicker. When something is in the popular culture and people really like it, the minute that it takes a misstep, or makes a decision that the audience doesn’t like as a whole, they’re very quick to say, “Let’s jump the shark,” or “We’re over it.” The reality is, we have to do that tap dance every week. George Lucas had 15 years to put Episodes 1, 2 and 3 together, and I think that’s why the fans were especially disappointed. They were like, “We waited all this time for that?” For us, every eight days, we’re generating a new episode of Lost, so there’s no way we can possibly avoid the inevitable, “It’s not as good as it once was.” It’s either not as good as it once was, or it’s never been better.
