Approaching Lost

Lost at Comic Con - Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse Chat Characters, Writing, ARGs, More

by Nikki on July 25th, 2008

Jeff Jensen led today’s Entertainment Weekly’s panel for Comic Con! Sitting on the panel to answer questions - Josh Schwartz, Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, Bryan Fuller, and Josh Friedman.

Off the bat, Jeff Jensen turned to Damon and Carlton to ask where the island is … “I don’t recall,” Carlton replied. How did Locke die and end up in a coffin? “We have no recollection of that,” Damon answered. Bummer! But they did divulge some slight spoilers and chatted about Lost, the characters, the mythology, the ARGs, and more …

Jeff began the true questioning by asking about the change in the previous and upcoming seasons based on the writer’s strikes. Damon and Carlton discussed having little time to complete Season 4 and revealed why they couldn’t do the finale in the originally allotted one hour. The Sawyer/Kate scene on the airport would just have consisted of a kiss and jump. The one thing they never did get enough time to cover was the Freighter People. They wanted to explore more of Miles, Daniel, and Charlotte - but they will continue to do so with Season 5 … in a different way than originally planned, but they will still get their time.

Carlton said that the ARGs are fun because, “they allow us to do things that we can’t do on the show.” It allows them to explore more of Widmore, Dharma, etc. And yes they are in the middle of creating one!

Jeff asked how the various shows deal with both mythology and working for the masses. Carlton says that primarily they are making a character film and so it transcends the genre of mythology, although they definitely dabble in it … it’s just that the characters don’t talk about what happened to them! “The metaphor is that the cake is the character show, but the frosting is the mythology.”

Damon counters the notion that shows need to stay away from being set in one genre, and instead embrace it. He talks about the success of The Dark Night and so, “why wean away from it?”

Since it’s Comic Con, the question was asked of how these shows compare or derive from comics. Damon began chatting about the depth and range of comic book stories. “When we created the Lostverse, we said let’s work on expanding it out and build the world. People will swallow a tremendous amount of story if you feed it to them a certain way.”

Jeff wanted to know the process for writing The Constant, which Bryan Fuller said was the best episode on television this year! “Normally it takes us a couple of weeks to break a Lost episode,” Carlton replied. “That one took us five weeks. In fact, the strike came along at the perfect time,” because they had depleted their lead time. “That was an episode that was impossible to explain to people,” Damon continued.

Audience Questions:

Is there one specific character that you no longer have in the show that you would like to see come back?
“Mr. Eko,” Carlton replied. “But Hawaii was just not Adewale’s bag. He got island fever,” he continued, so they had to end the arc of that character.

Who chose the name Jeremy Bentham and was he chosen because of the Panopticon prison?
“At the end of Season 3, we see a piece of this obituary that Jack hands to Kate,” Damon replied. “And part of the name is obscured but you can see the J and the A-M.” So they had chosen the name Jeremy Bentham a year before, and yes it had to do with the prison. Damon said that they have a list of philosopher’s names that they pull from, but this one had to go to Locke.

Charlie dies because of Desmond’s prediction of Claire getting off the island with Aaron. Then Aaron is with Kate in the future. Which idea came first?
Damon says that these ideas aren’t unrelated and that they will resolve the paradox. As for Claire and her fate … “You will see Claire, maybe not for a bit, but it will all soon become very clear to you,” Carlton answers.

Are you worried about the concept of Time Travel being overused?
“We’ll tell you yesterday,” Carlton jokes. “We hope that we’re putting our own spin on time travel.” He says that they aren’t postulating alternate futures or the ability for a character to change their future. Damon continues, saying there are too many cops shows, doctor shows, and law shows. He’d be thrilled if the networks started to say there are too many time travel shows!

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POSTED IN: Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof