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Island Fever
This season, 'Lost' had its share of setbacks and frayed nerves, but it's still the coolest show on TV. NEWSWEEK hits the beach for the wild finale.
By Marc Peyser
Newsweek
May 22, 2006 issue - To get to the set, you have to drive 45 minutes north of Honolulu, and you have to know where you're going. There's no sign—they don't call it "Lost" for nothing—just a red flare stuck in a dirt road past some pineapple and coffee fields, along with a note: BASE CAMP. It's 7:30 on a drizzly May morning, and the cast is rehearsing a funeral on the beach. There are five graves. The two most recent are open, and contain corpses of Ana Lucia and Libby, wrapped in gray flannel. As usual on any TV show, a two-minute scene takes forever to film. The rain doesn't help. In between takes, Josh Holloway (who plays Sawyer) does push-ups on a grave.
Evangeline Lilly (Kate) goes "10-1"—set talk for a bathroom break—then reads a Christian self-help book. Daniel Dae Kim (Jin), Dominic Monaghan (Charlie) and Jorge Garcia (Hurley) trade stories about their most embarrassing childhood moments—Monaghan's concerns a dirty diaper at the zoo. When the rain stops around 9 a.m., the actors are in such a hurry to finish, they just throw their umbrellas onto Ana Lucia's corpse. No one seems to notice the rainbow glowing just over the ocean. Or the fact that, thanks to an earthquake in the South Pacific, the area is under a tsunami watch.
Then again, dodging big waves is nothing new for "Lost." Since its debut last season, the ABC drama has established itself as the most creative and daring show on network television. In an era of procedural dramas—the McMystery franchises "CSI" and "Law & Order" and their many clones—that are built to rake in cash through syndication, "Lost" dares to tell an intricate, sprawling story that mashes up religion, sci-fi and existentialism with more than a dozen flesh-and-blood characters. The show won an Emmy in its maiden season and has spawned the kind of rabid fandom not seen since the heyday of "The X-Files." But success has come with some risks—the tsunami lurking behind the rainbow.
Viewership is down 20 percent in the second half of this season—when are people going to realize how boring "American Idol" is this year?—despite a raft of tie-ins, including an online clue hunt, a novel "written" by a crash victim and free streaming video. The cast is battling its own strain of island fever, brought on by the paparazzi, the isolation and the pressure of living up to expectations—not to mention the occasional run-in with the cops. To a person, the actors all say they love living in Hawaii and acting in the coolest show on TV. But during NEWSWEEK's exclusive visit to the set during the filming of the finale, you could sense the other side of paradise. "It's been a taxing season, to be honest," says Monaghan. "We're not the new, big hit show now. We're not shocking people like we used to. The natural transition is to not be as big as we used to be. It's tough, man."
"Lost" started simply enough as a show about a plane crash and its survivors—it was actually conceived as a dramatized version of "Survivor." But this year it virtually reinvented itself. The castaways discovered more survivors who crashed on a different part of the island, a nasty band of bushmen called "the others" and an underground bunker with a computer that inexplicably requires six numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42) to be input every 108 minutes. "Lost" is chock-full of eerie, seemingly unexplained phenomena, and the finale will clear some of them up. "You'll be able to do a lot of speculating and theorizing about what exactly is going on," says executive producer Carlton Cuse. But it wouldn't be "Lost" if the show didn't stir up as many mysteries as it solves. The producers are so nervous about guarding their new secrets, they've given the very last scene a code name—"challah," as in the Jewish bread that's full of twists. They haven't even told the cast what's going to happen.
So, do you wanna know what we know about the finale? Skip this paragraph if you don't—though it's not as if we could solve the whole "Lost" riddle. But here are some tidbits. "We are going to tell you why the plane crashed," says Cuse. "We're going to explain what happens if you don't push the button. And we're going to resolve the Michael-and-Walt story." (Michael's son, Walt, was kidnapped by "the others" in last year's season finale and has been missing ever since.) Desmond, the enigmatic guy originally discovered in the hatch, also reappears, and he's not in good shape, though he gives the survivors fresh hope for escape. Just as last year's finale expanded our scope of the island's boundaries, this year's will expand its relevance. "There is something else that is reverberating on our planet that is directly linked to this island," says Monaghan. "You begin to understand that what is happening there has a significant butterfly effect in the rest of the world." One more thing: we think another character is going to die, or come close. It's just a hypothesis, based on the fact that when we asked Michelle Rodriguez (Ana Lucia) to guess which character would die after Libby, she said: "I can't do that, 'cause I know." Then she clammed up.
Some actors think they know even more than that. "A buddy of mine actually got a part in the 'challah,' so I got to know a little bit more," says Garcia. "I know," insists Matthew Fox, who plays doctor Jack. How? "I just know. I have my sources." But most of them don't, and they're not all crazy about being kept in the dark. "It's a little bit difficult," says Harold Perrineau (Michael). "I'm one of those actors who likes to give himself a running start on how to be in touch with this or that. Last year we didn't know the finale until the day it was shot—we went out on the raft and there were pages missing in the script. Suddenly, there's a lot to wrap your head around."
But it's not just about the work. The actors are also fans of the show. Many of them have their own theories about the island (see interactive above). They often watch the show together—whichever character is featured in that week's flashback hosts the viewing party. "I've never watched a show as religiously as I've watched this, and I've never enjoyed one that I've been involved in as much," says Terry O'Quinn (Locke). O'Quinn is one of the few actors who don't like to speculate about the show, even about the most basic questions, like how Locke became a paraplegic. "When the question is answered, the answer will be disappointing—it's the question that's fun," he says. "He's a mysterious character, and that's what makes him compelling."
Besides, O'Quinn is just too damn busy to study anything beyond that week's script. As the season wound down, the cast was shooting three or four episodes simultaneously, sometimes working 20-hour days. They had to squeeze in our interviews during lunch or in the few minutes between scenes. Lilly stood on the side of a dirt supply road getting pushed farther and farther into the bush by equipment trucks. Fox—the cast calls him "Foxy"—grabbed a few minutes in a clearing behind the beach where the extras wait, next to the Porta Potti. They were all unfailingly nice and upbeat about their show. (Except for Naveen Andrews, who was said to be "not feeling well" and declined to be interviewed. Wait a minute. Surely they're not going to bump him off next!)
Still, you could tell that the cast was exhausted—Daniel Kim and Perrineau answered their trailer doors in their underwear because they had to sacrifice nap time to chat—and that they're starting to get on each other's nerves. "It's tough being involved in a shoot with a large cast," says Monaghan, sitting in his trailer, where the floor is piled with FedEx envelopes filled with fan mail. "Just the sheer politics can drag you down. So-and-so is not getting screen time. So-and-so is not showing up on time. So-and-so isn't behaving well on set. That's the toughest thing—coming home and going, Well, I behaved OK, but three or four people didn't." Despite mixed emotions, Monaghan brought a camera to the set to take pictures of his castmates, like a kid on the last day of school. "We're like brothers and sisters," says Lilly. "There are days when you want to thank them for being in your life, and there are days when you want to punch them in the face."
You'd better behave on "Lost"—no network TV show has ever killed off so many major characters so early in its run. For the record, the producers insist they didn't kill Ana Lucia and Libby because Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros, the actresses who play them, were arrested in December for DUI. "The truth is that we had this plan for Ana Lucia last year when Michelle met with us. She was, like, 'I want to do the show for one year,' so we put this plan in motion independent of her getting a DUI," says Cuse. "And the Libby thing was just a sort of twist that we felt elevated the scene to another level." Still, the actors know they're vulnerable—in an early version of the pilot, the producers had planned to kill Jack and changed their minds only when Stephen McPherson, now the president of ABC Entertainment, talked them out of it. Do the actors worry about their fates? "Sure, I'll be out of a good job," says O'Quinn. "I don't think there's any person on this show who is not expendable. If I said they didn't have the nerve to kill me, I'd be some kind of fool, wouldn't I?"
Forget about Locke or Jack or Ana Lucia—the really big question is, how will "Lost" end? Will we ever learn the secret to the island? The hatches. The numbers. The Dutch company that apparently ran a psychiatric experiment on the island 25 years earlier. The chance meetings so many characters had before the crash. Will all the pieces of the puzzle fit, or will "Lost" fall apart under the weight of its own mythology, like "Twin Peaks"? If the producers have their way, you'll get answers in the next three or four years, before the story lines and mysteries spin out of control. "This story is meant to end—people want to see the final chapter," says Cuse.
But in the meantime, they warn fans not to try to connect every plotlet. For instance, it was actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje's idea, not the writers', for Eko to write Scripture on his stick, so those entries probably aren't very significant. Ditto for some of the flashback crossovers. Some are clearly important, such as Jack's dad's relationship with Ana Lucia. But others—like the time Kate's mom waited on Sawyer in a diner—are merely a wink at the audience. "We never promised that there would be a unified-field theory of 'Lost'," says Damon Lindelof, who created the show with J. J. Abrams ("Alias," "M:i:III"). "You'll get many small answers along the way, and ultimately you will understand this island, but all those answers might not necessarily be reduced to a simple one-sentence explanation." Until then, all you conspiracy theorists—just enjoy the trip, and get lost.
