Lost Season Six: "Who's Going to Live, Who's Going to Die?"

Show runner Damon Lindelof answers a few burning Q's about the final episodes of Lost

By Jennifer Godwin Nov 17, 2009 1:34 PMTags
Josh HollowayART STREIBER/ABC

Want to know which questions are most likely to be answered by the final hours of Lost, which direction Josh Holloway's Sawyer might be going (romantically and otherwise), and why we fans need to be wary of double-talking producer doubles?

Well, good news then! Lost boss Damon Lindelof and the rest of Bad Robot movie and TV mafia came out to party Monday night at the beautifully lit Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, which was all decked out for the gala DVD/Blu-ray premiere of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie. And while the new Star Trek movie is straight awesome, we got so excited by all the TV talent present that we had to also ask them a few burning questions about the final season of Lost, which is set to premiere on ABC in just about two months.

The guys were kind enough to put up with our inquiries, and we're sharing the scoop they spilled about your burning questions...

So What Is Lost's One True Pairing? We find that a lot of good literature follows the same tropes and arcs, so in hopes of getting a teeny-tiny bit of clarity on the final-season direction of some of Lost's major romantic storylines, we asked Lost boss Lindelof to compare Sawyer's love life on Lost to the love story in any other fictional work. "Wow," said Lindelof, "Sawyer's love life compared to any..." (He looked a little dazed at all the possible options, so we threw The Notebook, Jane Eyre and Gilligan's Island at him as totally random starting points for thinking about the question.) "All way off so far!" Lindelof said. "Perhaps the relationship between Gilligan and the Skipper, because there's a lot of hitting on the head with hats...OK. Serious...I think Wuthering Heights is probably a good one then. We've got a little Heathcliff action going on."

Putting aside our memories of the wacky cartoon alley cat, we find Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights an incredibly intriguing answer to this question. Literary scholars: Compare the stories of Emily Brontë's Heathcliff and and Lost's Sawyer so far. Senior shipper analysts, please convene a white-paper committee in the comments section to debate and report on these and other questions: In a metaphor where Heathcliff is equivalent to Sawyer, which Lost character is Catherine Earnshaw? Who stands for Edgar and Isabella? Is there a young Cathy or a Hareton figure in Lost? Can Heathcliff/Sawyer ever overcome his basic wildness? And does this presage a tragic and perhaps lonely end for James Ford? (So much to discuss!)

These and Other Answers, to Come: So what can we expect to learn from the sixth and final season of Lost? Lindelof shared a sneak preview: "The questions that count will be answered, and the questions that the fans don't want answered won't be answered, but I think what they're looking for is a real sense of resolution, particularly on a character level. Who's going to live, who's going to die, who's going to hook up with who, why were they all brought here in the first place, was it arbitrary, is there meaning behind it? That's the kind of stuff [we] have to answer, or [we] should be prepared to get rocks thrown at [us]."

This Is the End, My Friend? When we get to the end of the series, is that the last and final word we'll ever hear about the Island and its denizens from Team Bad Robot? Says Lindelof, "We're going to be out there doing other stuff. Just like right now I'm talking to you about Lost at the Star Trek DVD rollout, we have to be held accountable for our actions. We're not going to go into hiding. I do, however, employ doubles, like Saddam did, so you can never trust that you're talking to the actual Damon Lindelof. That being said, what we don't want to do—and [fellow executive producer] Carlton [Cuse] and I talk about this all the time—is explain what our intention was. At a certain point, it doesn't matter what our intention was, and we want the fans to vigorously debate certain aspects of the show. Some things will be very conclusive, other things people will think are more conclusive than we meant them, and some will be more ambiguous than we meant them, but it wouldn't be Lost if five years from now people weren't still arguing over what they wanted it to be."

Please Don't Shake the Gaily Wrapped Packages Too Hard: So how does it feel to be a Lost show runner on the eve of the sixth and final season? Lindelof tells us it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas: "It's very exciting to us basically. It feels like we've been Christmas shopping for five years, and we've been accruing all these presents, and we've been locking them up in closets and not letting people look at them. And now there's sort of this, 'Oh my god, do they have one of these already? Did I get the right sizes? What was I thinking when I bought this? Are they even going to like it?' So there's a terror there, but at the same time, Christmas is here and it's time to open up the closet and start unwrapping and we'll see what happens."

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J.J. Abrams Isn't Particularly Busy or Anything, Is He? Will Star Trek director and content producer extraordinaire J.J. Abrams be involved in writing or directing any of Lost season six? "I will not," says Abrams, “but I will be watching in amazement of what Damon and Carlton do." (Note: The Lost finale should rightfully be directed by producing Lost director Jack Bender, aka the man who has put in six years with the show in Hawaii and totally deserves the honor of directing the finale. That said, if for some reason Bender's not in the mood or is busy that week, wouldn't it be perfect if Abrams directed the Lost series finale, as he directed the series pilot? Is anyone else hearing "The Circle of Life" from The Lion King in their heads right now?)

Multimedia Damon Lindelof: As for Star Trek Dos, as we've dorkily taken to calling the expected sequel to this summer's hit movie, Damon Lindelof says, "Alex [Kurtzman], Bob [Orci] and I are writing it together, and I will be producing it in my similar capacity to the first one. I'm looking forward to it, because this time I won't have to run between my Lost duties and my Trek duties."

Want to support the nice people at Bad Robot in thanks for all the neat entertainment they've provided us over the years? Of course you do! To wit: The Star Trek comes out on DVD and Blu-ray this very day, and Lost returns to TV in mid-January on ABC.

Seriously, what do you think of the Sawyer-Heathcliff metaphor? And what questions do you most want answered in the final hours of Lost? Hit the comments!

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Follow Kristin on Twitter @kristinalert.