Carlton Cuse And Damon Lindelof Explain The Lost Series Finale… Again

By Rudie Obias | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

JackBelieve it or not, the 10-year anniversary of Lost will be celebrated in September 2014. Lost has been off the air since 2010, but there are still big questions about the series as a whole. The last two seasons were not the greatest, and the show’s ending in particular infuriated many loyal fans. Over the weekend, Lost showrunners Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof reunited with a few cast members at the Paley Center for Media during PaleyFest 2014 in Los Angeles, California.

Four years after the controversial series finale, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof are still trying to explain what exactly happen at the end of Lost. While some are apparently still arguing that the castaways all died in the plane crash of Oceanic 815 at the beginning of the series, Cuse and Lindelof reiterate — yet again — that that wasn’t the case. Cuse said (via Digital Spy):

“No, no, no. They were not dead the whole time,” Cuse said, explaining that footage of the plane wreckage at the end of the show was meant to act as a buffer.

“We thought, let’s put those shots [of the plane wreckage] at the end of the show and it will be a little buffer and lull. And when people saw the footage of the plane with no survivors, it exacerbated the problem.

“But the characters definitely survived the plane crash and really were on a very real island. At the very end of the series, though? Yep, they were all dead when they met up in heaven for the final ‘church’ scene.”

Cuse went on to explain that the series finale was always going to be the finale they had in mind over the years, and that the showrunners wanted Lost to end on a spiritual note. While the decision to end Lost in non-denominational church was received with heavy criticism for years to come, Cuse and Lindelof stand by their decision to take Lost in this direction for its series finale. Cuse said:

We felt the ending really had to be spiritual, and one that talks about destiny. We would have long discourses about the nature of the show, for many years, and we decided it needed to mean something to us and our belief system and the characters and how all of us are here to lift each other up in our lives.

Damon Lindelof also downplayed the popular theory that the characters had been in purgatory. Even though some would argue that the purgatory theory works better than what we actually got, Lindelof contends that the series finale is stronger their way. Lindelof said:

“For us, one of the ongoing conversations with the audience and there was a very early perception, was that the island was purgatory and we were always out there saying, ‘It’s not purgatory, this is real, we’re not going to Sixth Sense you’. And we felt it too that the show had to become sort of meta in this way.”

The Lost series finale is always going to be one of those things where you either love it or hate it. I was slowly moving away from Lost beginning with the end of season four, so I wasn’t too upset with the series finale. For me, the last two seasons were a complete clusterfuck that couldn’t be salvaged with a coherent series finale. But no matter what, Lost started off being a great TV show with one of the best TV pilots ever made. It’s just that after that premiere episode, not even the series creators could live up to the promise of the show’s first two episodes.

Meanwhile, the Lost 10-year reunion was met with smiles and cheers as cast members attended PaleyFest 2014 in L.A. While the series’ bigger names such as Matthew Fox (Jack), Evangeline Lilly (Kate), J.J. Abrams, and Terry O’Quinn (Locke) couldn’t attend, the people in the audience got to see Josh Holloway (Sawyer), Yunjin Kim (Sun), Ian Somerhalder (Boone), Maggie Grace (Shannon), Henry Ian Cusick (Desmond), Malcolm David Kelley (Walt), and Jorge Garcia (Hurley) reunite.

The PaleyFest reunion isn’t the only Lost event celebrating the TV show’s 10-year anniversary. The “Lost 2014: The 10-Year Fan Gathering” event will take place in Oahu, Hawaii from September 20-22. The event will include members of the cast and a special two-hour screening of the pilot episode on the beach where it was filmed.