Cynthia in Ireland: I was so happy to hear about Charlie, Shannon and Claire returning to Lost next season, and then so bummed to find out that nothing except Claire is for sure yet. What’s the current status of various dead castmembers returning to Lost? Even though Dominic Monaghan is said to be appearing on another ABC show next season, reportedly Flash Forward, we’re just paranoid enough to think it might be a double cross, and that D.M. might actually be heading back to Lost after (or in addition to) whatever else he does on the Alphabet Net. Why do we think this? Because very reliable sources now tell us that there is “mutual interest” (between the Lost PTB and Dominic Monaghan) in bringing about a season-six return visit by Charlie Pace. Look for official developments in the next week or two.
Thanks to NoOne and Carry for the heads up. FYI: DarkUFO reader Carry is the one who asked the question!
I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Mitchell and can’t wait for her to go back to Lost. Do you know when V’s 13 episodes will finish shooting? Might Elizabeth be back only for the second half of Lost’s selesai season? — Carry MATT: Mitchell’s V-Lost conflict is not one of just time but space, seeing as V shoots in Vancouver, 6 1/2 hours from Hawaii. That said, V starts production in early August, while Lost doesn’t start up again until the end of that month. And now that we know that Lost’s selesai season has been extended to be 18 hours, and there’s a slightly better chance that Juliet will spend some QT with her Romeo, Sawyer.
Ausiello: May’s series finale is going to be a real downer, predicts Michael Emerson. “I don’t think Lost will have a happy ending,” he confessed to us at the Saturn Awards. “It’s the end and I think we are going to start seeing more casualties. I would put money on major characters being killed. I believe it will be a sad ending to the show — or at least bittersweet. I think it will definitely be a series finale for grownups.” Emerson, meanwhile, is still trying to make sense of the season 5 finale. (Join the club!) “I killed Jacob… maybe… probably,” he hedged. “It isn’t like we haven’t seen plenty of other people be killed and somehow come back. And what does it mean if I did kill him? I Who the hell was he anyway? Obviously, Ben wanted a father. So much of our show is about bad fathers. It is one of our biggest themes. And Jacob disappointed in those simpulan moments. And maybe Jacob made it easy for him. Maybe that was all meant to happen. Is it all ordained? Maybe. And for that matter, can Jacob even be killed? Stay tuned is my response.”
“What the hell’s going on with Lost? I don’t think they know. I think from week to week they go, ‘Let’s do this.’ And then someone else says, ‘No, this would be a good idea.’ I love that show, but I don’t think they know what they’re doing.” —Ellen DeGeneres
“I am flattered that Ellen is a fan of our show,” says exec producer Carlton Cuse, who promises Ellen there is a master plan, with some sweet payoffs, if she sticks through the selesai season. Dominic Monaghan recently had a secret breakfast meeting with producer Damon Lindelof to discuss how he might manage returning to Lost as Charlie. “We would like there to be some visitations from people we’ve loved over time,” Cuse says. Michael Emerson, who plays Ben, confirms, “The selesai season will resemble the first. I know there are plans for big people we have parted company with to reappear.” But one crucial component from the very first pilot episode will most likely be absent from the reunion: cocreator J.J. Abrams, who tells me he won’t be returning to Hawaii to direct the series finale. “I would selfishly love it,” he says, “but director Jack Bender has been living in Hawaii for years and doing amazing work. For me to come in and direct the finale would be cruel and unusual.”
Update: 6th July 21:40 Thanks to Ramsey for the following.
So my pal Matt and I attended the really fun – and a bit emotional Bandar Ceme at bits where they showed clips like the Oceanic survivors buliding and sailing off on a raft from Season 1 and Desmond finally getting thru to Penny in The Constant.
Anyhow – there was a signing after and all I had on me was a copy of ‘Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince’ that i’m trying to read before the movie comes out. Carlton & Damon said during the Q&A that JK Rowling’s brave announcement that they’ll only be 7 Harry Potter books inspired them to make LOST just 6 seasons long. They both signed by book and after a read what Damon wrote inside: ”Locke is VERY simular to Snape!” Shock! LOL
Update: 6th July Thanks to Deniz who as at the event for sending us his photos.
Hey All, LOST writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse along with Director Jack Bender held a Q&A Session in Curzon. Lucky for us, several fans attended and were able to provide us with the details.
We were sent both the audio and a summary, so special thanks to Gob for the audio and my good friend and podcast partner Karen for the heads up about a summary from her friend Matt who was in attendance as well.
NOTE: Since the panel was in some auditorium, the folks in the audience asking questions were much louder than Darlton and Bender, so I tried my best to balance it out. So I hope you all can listen. In case you can’t listen or hear the audio too well, the summary is behind the button.
Plus, I have not had a chance to listen to the audio or read the whole summary yet, so I am posting this all here in the spoilers section just in case.
Enjoy!!
Curzon Q&A with Darlton and Jack Bender
Initial thank yous, then showed a recap video of Lost.
1) D&C confirmed that Stranger In A Strange Land was the turning point for the studio, and they were allowed to establish an end date. 2) Jack’s beard is bad. 3) 16 episodes next year, but 18 hours of Lost. Jack Bender confirmed a two hour season premiere, and a two hour finale. 4) After Lost, they will go in to hiding for a while, due to the inevitably interpretive quality to the series ending. Damon: You are married to your destiny, you can try to avoid it, but it will catch up to you. This is why Charlie shut the door in the Looking Glass station, because he embraced his death. Sometimes they get pointers from the studio, telling them stuff is too outlandish. Originally, in the season four premiere, Hurley was going to come across himself in Jacob’s cabin, but the network urged them to change the scene to Christian Shepherd, afraid it would set a precedent of weirdness. With season six, there won’t be any of that
Questions:
Q: What was your favorite scene to watch or write? CC: The scoring session we attended for the raft’s launch at the end of Exodus . These musicians were playing this incredible music without having rehearsed it, and the moment was so beautiful, there were tears in the control booth. That was just one of those great moments where you felt this blessed synergy of all these talented collaborators all come together and make Lost what it is. JB: I love all of them DL: I have many…but for me, during season one, when we first started writing the show coming out of the pilot, when it first started revealing itself, was really cool. I’m drawn to scenes that take place with just two characters and somehow they’re talking about very very heady things and I’m a huge fan of whenever Jack and Locke talk to each other. We’ve been very judicious in having those guys talk to each other, it happens very rarely. I go back back to White Rabbit and that 6 or 7 minute long scene where they’re just sitting in the jungle and Jack says he’s following the impossible and Locke says what if it’s not impossible and we were all put here for a reason, and that scene is the genesis for those guys’ relationship and if you think about how that was the 3rd episode shot out of the pilot, here we are now, 100 episodes later, and now Jack is finally saying ‘Y’know, Locke might be onto something’ CC: Jack’s kinda slow. DL: It had to permeate through his beard Q: My wife is fascinated with the artistry of delivering this idea into a script. We had, in a video podcast last year, a glimpse into the writers’ room and she’s fascinated that you get the idea and put it into a script CC: We have a call centre in Delhi. We just ask them ‘we need a flashforward this week’ DL: We have a minicamp before we write, where we just discuss the season with the writers, the character arcs and we decide on the season’s jawaban image so we know exactly our beginning and where we’re trying to get to. Once we start writing the show on a week-to-week episode basis it gets a bit more intense CC: We spend a lot of time breaking each aspect of the story and once we have the story worked out from beginning to end, we’ll put it up on whiteboard and then pitch it back to ourselves, and we’ll have scenes in different colours, withan on island story, an off island story, and a C-story, split it into six acts for the commercial breaks and structure it so you’ll wanna come back after each act. Then we’ll give it to some writers to rewrite and send back, and we’ll give our notes, make some changes Q: Jack was originally a protagonist for the show, but he seems to have gotten more antagonistic as it goes on. Was this intentional? JB: Matthew Fox loved the idea of wearing the not so flattering jumpsuits and his character beginning to let go of his heroic side, which people accuse me of, taking Jack Shepherd’s character. DL: Basically Jack spent a hundred hours majorly rejecting it, there was no purpose whatsoever to the island and now he’s come back in the 70s and he’s still waiting to be told ‘Here’s what you’re supposed to do’ and then when he is told what to do, he then gets to decide what he is going to do, so basically it’s contingent on what he feels his mission is. Q: Can we get more Lost screening where you project episodes in a cinema like this? CC: I think so. It’s a good idea and it may happen in some form or other Q: On the official website, there was a video of behind the scenes and you went into your offices and you had a wall of whose dead and whose alive, I want to know about Claire being on the wall of dead [shocked gasps from audience] DL: Are you absolutely sure Q: I am DL: [explains wall of alive, dead, undead] Well, uh, if you say you saw her there, I don’t know what to tell you. JB: I think her agent slipped it in there DL: She is going to be back on the show. CC: Eventually all of them will be on the wall of the dead. Q: My question is about the fate of Lost, because I know it ends with season 6, but do you think because of Bryan Fuller with Pushing Daisies continuing it in a comic book, and I love Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk (Damon’s comic) and with Lost it has a disjointed timeline and it comes together in the end, do you think that you’ll do any spin offs in a comic book form? DL: We feel that if we hold anything back for the jawaban season of the show, it will be bad. People have come along this far, and they need a conclusion. Q: You make a lot about the characters searching for their destiny and their purpose, do you feel that you yourselves had a purpose in your own lives being involved in the show, or you’ve learned something about life from doing it? CC: I think as writers we use the show to explore personal issues, spiritual or otherwise. We’re mainly concerned by how much faith and how much control do you have over your own destiny, something which is very fascinating to us, and obviously season 5 was an exploration of that with the time travel leading to an event at the end of the season, so that is going to be something we’re going to explore a lot on the jawaban season of the show. The writers room is diverse and that diversity gets worked out in the characters. Q: What’s Brian K. Vaughan like? DL: Unfortunately he has left for greener pastures. When he first came on the show Jorge Garcia was ecstatic because he’s a huge fan of his work. Q: Where are exactly are you with season 6? CC: We are here, and the following Monday we’ll start writing. JB: Shooting starts August 24th CC: We’ll work continuously until the middle of April and the show will air sometime between January and February and will finish around May. Q: I want to know about the end of Lost. Michael Emerson said in an interview this week that he suspects it will be quite bittersweet or melancholy. Is it going to be an upbeat ending or ambiguous? Just any kind of hint to the flavour of the ending. DL: All of the above. We are aspiring for an ending that is fair. Bittersweet comes with the territory. The ending will be different as for once, we won’t leave you on a cliffhanger. You will stay on the cliff this time. CC: We hope that if we like it, you will like it. Q: I was sad Charlie died, but he had to die to give his story credibility. That makes me wonder about John Locke. The fact he is now dead, having hit his lowest ebb…what’s up with that character arc? CC: We’re not prepared to answer any of those questions here tonight. We feel that the jawaban part of the experience of Lost is that you have this time between to theorise, postulate, agonise. JB: If the actors really need to know what’s coming ahead, they’ll ask. As an example, Josh Holloway did not know what he was whispering to Kate when he jumped out of the helicopter, and neither did Evangeline Lilly, but the actors sold it so well. Terry O’ Quinn was playing Locke with this dark mysterious quality, unintentionally playing into the ending which he didn’t know. I presented him with the script asking him he wanted to read it and he was sure. He came back after saying ‘I wish I hadn’t read it’ Q: How much do you know about each character’s story, are there any you’re particularly proud of, or not proud of? DL: When you come up with an idea for a character, and they come into the show, like Eko, who was originally a priest who had a crisis of faith, and we found Adewale in New York, and we basically said we don’t buy that this guy is a priest who has lost his faith, we buy that this guy is a warlord impersonating a priest, and somewhere along the way he’d decide he wasn’t just impersonating a priest, he’d decide to be one. So we’re certainly proud of the way that one worked out, and as for the ones we’re not proud of, we bury alive…or have Michael shoot them. Q: How do you come up with these amazing twists CC: A lot of getting yourself to a point where you cry. We have a really brilliant writing staff and that’s part of the DNA of the show now, and that’s a big part of the writer’s room, how we re-route things one way and flip it back another. We love introducing a character in a certain way and then reveal the character to be very different. You know originally Sawyer tested the second lowest after the pilot, and now of course he’s a very heroic version of that character. Q: Keep the Smoke! DL: You’ll be seeing the smoke in a probably interesting character in itself JB: And it will be in the shape of Jack’s beard Q: Season 5 was hard work watching, with time travel. How are you going to pay that off DL: We acknowledge with a degree of difficulty. We were ostensibly frightened at first with the time travel story, were basically desperate to get everybody back together again. Time travel is now complete and everybody gets back together in one form or another and we feel that season 6 is a lot like season 1 with its community. Q&A ended here. The guys signed stuff for the fans. My friend had a copy of Half Blood Prince, Damon signed it saying ‘Locke is VERY similar to Snape!’
The exec producer of Ian Somerhalder’s new CW series, The Vampire Diaries, is close friends with Lost exec producer Damon Lindelof. So when he’s not sucking blood in the South, Ian may reappear on the island as Boone. While apartment hunting in Atlanta, where Diaries shoots, with his new on-screen vampire brother Paul Wesley, Ian tells me, “I’ve heard a little bit about what’s happening this season on Lost, and there’s definitely an avenue they’re going down to bring back a lot of us.”
Any crossover [with] Lost would “only help the success of our show…as long as it’s not screwing up production,” Ian says. So what if Boone, Shannon, Charlie and the rest of Lost’s “living dead” turn out to be vampires? “That would not be good,” says the actor, who currently lives around the corner from Maggie Grace (Shannon) in Venice Beach. “There are already enough vampires flying around the airwaves. If we can keep it at True Blood, Twilight and Vampire Diaries, the world will be better off!”
In this installment of TVGuide.com’s Getting Lost video series, we plucked a few reader questions out of the Getting Lost mailbag.
The topics that are addressed:
• Did Matthew Fox and a young Malcolm David Kelley pre-film a scene during Season 1 to be used in the series finale? • With Emilie de Ravin back as a series regular for the selesai season, will Claire be alive… or that special Lost kind of dead? • Has a time slot — or at least a month — been set for Lost’s selesai season premiere?
These are pics I took in Hawaii in mid-march right before the S5 finale was being filmed. I figued the stand was for the end of that season and was surprised to see it wasn’t used. It must be for S6 sometime- probably a flashback then. Anyways, the interesting thing about the stand was that the hole underneath it where the bomb must have been lowered was covered with a cap in the shape of a dharma logo! How did dharma get a hold of it? I’ve attached some pics.
Your Q&A with Titus Welliver made me even more impatient for Lost’s return (as if that were possible). Got any other scoop on the akibat season? — Meg MATT: It depends on what you make of the following: TVGuide.com editor Adam Bryant just returned from a trip to Hawaii, and during a tour of Lost filming locations, the wooden structure from which Jughead originally dangled was still erect on Oahu. Keeping in mind that Lost is meticulous about putting away their toys after they are done being used, I ask: Why is a set piece from the 1954 storyline still camera-ready? (ABC had no comment.)
