Entertainment Weekly interviews two of the Lost writers, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, fresh off the picket lines bringing us some wicked good spoilers.
Those of you wracking your brains about the bracelet, drop it:
DAMON LINDELOF: I got some e-mails from people who wondered if there was a connection between Naomi’s bracelet and the bracelet worn by the woman Sayid killed in his flash-forward. There is no connective tissue. Sometimes a bracelet is just a bracelet. We just thought it would be a cool emotional touchstone for Sayid; Elsa’s bracelet reminds him of Naomi.
Confused about flash-forward timelines? Flash-forwards are always sequential:
LINDELOF: When we’re presenting you with a [flash-forward] narrative, it’s always happening in chronological order.
CUSE: Lost is complex and dense, but we are very conscious of the limits. If we are going to jump time, we’re not going to jump narrative order within the time jumps, too.
Surely, Jack can’t be miserable at the end of the series! This must be just a future possibility? Nope:
CARLTON CUSE: We want people to believe in the stakes of the show. The problem with alternative realities is that you never know when the rug is going to be pulled out from under you. We want the audience to believe that the jeopardy is real. Postulating alternative realities would be an escape valve that would be damaging that as a narrative value… We want the audience to believe that is THE future. We don’t want people thinking, ”Well, since there are five iterations of this, I’m not going to invest in what’s happening to the characters.”
What’s this season all about?
This year, it’s all about the castaways’ relationship to the Freighter folk. Since day one, their goal has been to get off the Island. Now our heroes will find themselves defending the very island they wanted to leave. The future hints at the fact that these folks have a deeper connection to the Island than they themselves realized.
This little bit gets my sci-fi heart a-thumping:
CUSE: Daniel Faraday’s rocket experiment in the Sayid episode, which established a time differential on the Island, was a very important scene in that it sets the table for things that come into play in the future of the show. We’ve learned a lot about our characters’ relationship to the Island, but now we’re going to learn their relationship to the outside world once they’ve been on the Island. This is an important new idea to the show.
So what really happened to Oceanic flight 815?
CUSE: We’ll know by the end of the season that there will be two alternative explanations for why Oceanic 815 is in the trench at the bottom of the ocean. It will not be clear which story one should believe.
LINDELOF: Both stories will be presented and both stories will have legitimate facts presented on their behalves.
CUSE: The act of taking a plane, filling it with dead bodies and putting it at the bottom of the ocean connotes a group that is pretty freakin’ powerful. You should be worried about the people involved in either scenario capable of doing something like that.
And what’s this all about?!?!
DAMON LINDELOF: Charlotte Lewis was an obvious reference to C.S. Lewis and an important clue to places we’re going at the end of the season.
Ladies and gents, stay tuned, I think this is going to be good…
