Bernard and Rose are still alive. And yellow lab Vincent won't get killed off. But only about 20 backdrop players survive past the opening episodes of Season 5 of Lost.

"A lot of the other Red Shirts, though, not so lucky," says Lost producer Carlton Cuse, in reference to those lesser, usually nameless, island survivors.

You'll see Jin, who may or may not have perished in the last season finale, back this season. Claire's not a regular character this season, but she'll pop up again in Season 6, which is the final season of Lost.

"We're not saying Jin is currently alive after the explosion of the freighter, but since we are telling stories in the past, the present and the future, you will definitely be seeing Jin's stories," Cuse says. "We're just not telling you when those are occurring."

Oops. Did I just reveal any spoilers?

I don't think so, but in a press conference on Friday with producers Cuse and Damon Lindelof, they asked reporters to be respectful of their openness and not reveal any spoilers. Like they gave out anything they didn't expect would crop up on every blog and TV column in North America and beyond.

Still, spoiler sites have been the bane of the Lost producers.

"People who went to spoiler sites and learned that the end of Season 3 was a flash-forward were gravely disappointed in the journey of that episode. It wrecked it for them. The fact that you don't know what's going to happen when you watch a Lost episode is a big part of what we try to do," Cuse says. "[Certain sites] are completely mercenary. They are just trying to use the spoilers to make money for themselves. It's hard to have any respect for that."

Last season Lost fans learned they had just 48 episodes left, pounded out over three 16-episode seasons -- does that have anything to do with John 3:16? Yes, it is the intense pondering of the minutia of Lost that has the producers ecstatic about the endgame. Of course, the writer's strike mucked up that John 3:16 speculation when only 14 episodes aired last season, with 17 episodes a piece scheduled for this season and next.

Viewers get a double dose of new episodes on Wednesday, and TV writers have already been treated to the first three episodes. It's all go and no whoa.

Lindelof says there are "no stall episodes" when you have an endgame and a limited number of episodes to wrap up the story. You know those stall episodes, the ones you have to wade through around the middle of any given series, advancing nothing but the tote board count of how many shows get delivered?

Season 5 offers up plenty of answers, with most packed near the end. Viewers have tried to reduce the series into a sentence, usually saying the island is purgatory. But while the themes of morality and fate and redemption have played a strong role in the series, it simply cannot be reduced to a one-liner.

By now, any Lostie knows that the show is all about time travel, with the island doomed to wander the timeline while those six who escaped need to return to save those left behind. And most of the sixers aren't too eager to go back.

"So the show's been a time-travel show for the last four years. We're just making it more apparent in the storytelling now," Lindelof says of the penultimate season about to begin. "Hopefully, as Season 5 unfolds, you will realize that time travel has been in the DNA of the show for quite some time."

While previous seasons have had flash-forwards and flashbacks, this season bounces through time like something out of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. This will be the year of Sawyer, with a lot of the action centering on him as the emerging leader of the island left-behinds. In episode three we get plenty of Sawyer humor, coupled with some nice play for Miles.

But this season viewers will also get a greater sense of the island's history.

"People have a lot of questions starting and stopping with 'what the hell is that four-toed statue?' But when we introduced the four-toed statue,our idea for doing it at that point was to show the history of the island was a long one," Cuse says. "Part of what this season will explore is exactly what has happened on the island in the past."

Negotiating an end date for the series was essential in making it a show that didn't go all The X-Files at the end.

"That completely liberated us. We didn't know whether the mythology had to last two seasons or nine seasons, and that was utterly paralyzing," Carlton says. "Now we know exactly how many episodes we have left, [and it has allowed] us to plan and do this stuff with confidence."

Lindelof says that they got to a point in the first seven episodes of Season 3 when everyone knew the show was falling apart creatively.

"We all knew it was treading into an area of complete and utter suckiness. It simply could not go on the way it was," Lindelof says, adding that he and Cuse would have left the show if ABC had not allowed them to have an end date.

Cuse says once they were able to pull the trigger on the flash-forwards, they entered into the beginning of the end for Lost.

"Time travel reflects a plunge towards the ending of which is irreversible," Cuse says. "Once we committed to doing that, there was only a certain amount of distance between that and where the story, in our opinion, had to end."

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us