May 25, 2006
Dickens, Challah and That Mysterious Island
By KATE AURTHUR
On last night's "Lost," which closed the island mystery's second season on ABC, a crucial plot development hinged on a copy of the Charles Dickens novel "Our Mutual Friend." (Readers who do not wish to know the particulars of the finale should stop here.)
In a flashback Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), the character "Lost" viewers know as the man who lived down the hatch, tells a prison guard that he carries around "Our Mutual Friend" because he means for it to be the last book he reads before dying. Later, on the island, when Desmond thinks that death is near, he finds a letter inside the book from the love of his life, Penny. Her letter inspires him to go on an apparent suicide mission to save the island and, the episode implied, possibly the world.
During a visit to New York City last week, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the executive producers who run "Lost," said they got the idea of the deathbed reading of "Our Mutual Friend" from an interview with the writer John Irving in which he said he was saving it for last. But besides paying tribute to Mr. Irving, they were eager to refer to Dickens for their own narrative purposes.
"He was writing chapter by chapter for newspapers," Mr. Cuse said. "We often think: 'How much did Dickens know when he was writing his stories? How much of it was planned out, and how much was flying by the seat of his pants because he had to get another chapter in?' " He paused, then said with a laugh, "We can respect what he went through."
More remarkable than the size of "Lost's" audience, which averages 15.3 million viewers, is its devotion. The show has inspired endless Internet chatter and solicits participation by viewers, who play its popular multiplatorm game, the Lost Experience. When Mr. Cuse and Mr. Lindelof began the writing process for this year's closing episode, they knew that a large number of fervent fans were bitterly disappointed in the Season 1 finale. The big twist in that episode was the kidnapping of 10-year-old Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) by the island's sinister inhabitants, known as the Others, who lived there before the plane crash that began the show. The writers had worked hard to keep Walt's abduction a secret from Internet spoiler sites, nicknaming the scene "the bagel" so as not to let its contents casually slip. (This year's shocker was dubbed "the challah.")
That genuinely surprising turn did not end the Season 1 finale however. Instead, in its final moments, the mystical Locke (Terry O'Quinn) and the practical Jack (Matthew Fox) stared down into a mysterious hatch Locke had found earlier in the season and had been trying to open. But fans were annoyed: what could possibly be down the hatch that would be worth a four-month wait?
When that finale was broadcast, Mr. Lindelof was in Hawaii about to be married. "We felt everybody was satisfied and psyched," he said. "It never occurred to us that the backlash was going to begin."
Mr. Cuse said: "There started to be Internet chatter. We take that feedback to heart. By the time August rolled around, the spin on it was everybody's frustrated that we didn't go into the hatch."
The Season 2 premiere tried to remedy that frustration immediately. In the hatch was Desmond, who had been stranded on the island three years earlier. There were also plentiful provisions, retro furniture and, most important, a button that needed to be pushed every 108 minutes to dispel a powerful electromagnetic charge that could lead to catastrophic consequences.
When talking about the construction of "Lost," Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse often refer to the Harry Potter books. They want each season, like each book in J. K. Rowling's series, to pose questions and answer them while at the same time maintaining a larger mystery that holds the audience. "This season's story was about the hatch," Mr. Cuse said. "We were very conscious of trying to make the end of the season more satisfying than last year. We wanted to answer a lot of questions."
Last night's episode solved two significant "Lost" puzzles, which turned out to be related. What would happen when the button wasn't pushed? (There was a huge explosion, and if Desmond had not activated a backup system, Mr. Cuse said, "It might have led to, ultimately, sucking everything on earth into itself.") And what crashed the castaways' plane? (It was a casualty of the only other instance when the button was not pushed on time.)
Because they don't know how long the show will run, Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse have to pace its revelations. "If you answer too many questions, the audience doesn't have anything to care about on the show anymore," Mr. Cuse said. "We had to end the show with a powerful mystery that suggested what the show was going to be about next year and would leave the audience curious about where we're going."
Ratings suffered as the season progressed. In response to complaints from both viewers and the show's creators, next season ABC will run the show in two uninterrupted segments, without reruns that stop its flow. But its biggest problem was the return of Fox's "American Idol" in January at the same time on Wednesday nights. Before then, original episodes of "Lost" delivered 21.5 million viewers; after, they brought in 16.5 million (and repeats fared poorly all season).
As for next season, the scene that Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse called "the challah" offered a preview. In the final minutes of last night's episode, the action on the island has ended, but in a coda that took place in unfamiliar settings, Penny, Desmond's wealthy, long-lost girlfriend, was told, "I think we found it." The implication viewers were left with was that the explosion on the island finally made it visible, at least temporarily, to someone desperately looking for it.
Will a rescue effort be a part of Season 3? Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse would not say but allowed that if this season was about the hatch, next season will be about the Others, as led by the oblique Henry Gale (played by Michael Emerson, who will join the regular cast). Mr. Cuse listed what viewers will learn about the Others by this time next year: "Who are these people? How many of them are there? What is their history? What are they trying to accomplish?"
Beyond serving as a teaser, the finale's last minutes were incredibly important to the larger story, Mr. Lindelof said, particularly since this was the first time in 49 hours of the show that "Lost" went off the island in the present, rather than in a flashback. "It's time to actually blow up several theories of the show," he said. "People who believe that they're in purgatory or that they're subjects of an experiment are going to start reassessing those theories based on the fact that we are literally showing you the outside world."
NYTimes
