Lost Won't Pull a Sopranos

For all you Losties out there fretting over the fate of Oceanic Flight 815's survivors, don't worry: There's a payoff coming.

Following the outcry over the cut-to-black finale of HBO's The Sopranos, the brain trust behind ABC's Lost promises there will be resolution to the series. Speaking at a conference in New York Wednesday, executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof revealed that they recently held a writer's "minicamp" to precisely plot out the show's final 48 episodes.

"Obviously, we can't wait to the 48th hour to say, 'Here are all the mysteries of the show,' " Lindelof told attendees of Promax/BDA conference, per the Hollywood Reporter.

Added Cuse: "I'm not sure there is any ending that will satisfy everyone. Our hope is that the ending will be...the logical conclusion of the story."

Lost's audience dipped after ABC decided to split the show's third season into a six-episode run in the fall and a 16-episode stint in the spring with a long hiatus in between. Cuse and Lindelof met with network executives and decided to set an official expiration date for Lost to keep hard-core devotees invested in the storyline.

There will be three more 16-episode seasons. The seasons will premiere in January and run uninterrupted through May. The fourth season will debut in January 2008, and the show will end in May 2010.

But with an eight-month wait between seasons, the producers announced plans to create a series of short "mobisodes" for viewing on mobile phones to keep fans engaged. The 90-second segments will feature the entire ensemble and will be available for download to Verizon Wireless customers beginning this fall. The shorts will also eventually pop up on ABC.com.

"How do you keep the show alive in the minds of the audience in that time?" asked Cuse.

The show runners said it took three years of negotiations to lock up deals with all the key cast members to appear in the mobisodes—an unusual expense for something that will only be viewed by a fraction of the show's audience, but something the producers say is worth it.

"It needs to be interesting enough and well produced enough that people feel they're getting enough bang for their buck, even if it's free, the bang for their time," offered Lindelof. "Nobody wanted to see two people sitting on a beach that we've never heard of talking and saying, 'Hey, did you hear what Jack and Kate did today?' You want to see Jack and Kate."

The producers came to that conclusion after realizing fans wanted to focus on the core castaways and not gimmicks. Case in point: The suspense novel Bad Twin purportedly written by author Gary Troup (an anagram for "purgatory"), who was aboard the doomed Oceanic flight. The actual novel failed to sell despite the hype that it purportedly featured hidden ties to Lost. 

Cuse and Lindelof also owned up to another blunder—the sudden appearance of two new characters, Nikki and Paulo. The producers referred to the pair as "socks," short for "sock puppets," because they came out of nowhere from the background of extras making up the rest of Oceanic's unnamed survivors.

Fans instantly hated the conniving twosome and Cuse and Lindelof couldn't find compelling story lines to keep them around. So Nikki and Paulo were killed off in an episode designed to appease irate viewers.

"We buried them alive," said Cuse. "Okay, you guys don't like Nikki and Paulo, there."

To promote the mobisodes—which will offer up scenarios that might not otherwise play out during the regular season as well as potential clues to the show's enigmas—Cuse and Lindelof plan to return to San Diego's Comic-Con convention where they first introduced Lost back in 2004.

The mini-episodes will debut sometime in the fall.