American drama Lost was originally aired on ABC from September to May , over six seasons which comprise a total of episodes. The drama also includes the elements of supernatural and science-fiction. The plot revolves around the survivors of a commercial jet airliner who flies between Sydney and Los Angeles after the plane crashes on a mysterious island near the South Pacific Ocean. The series has the most misunderstood finale of the decade.
The final scenes of Lost intercut the events on the island and an alternate timeline which is known as the flash-sideways scenes that replace the flashbacks and flashforwards for the final season. The scene comes after Juliet who is stuck in the s, detonates a hydrogen bomb in the final moments of the fifth season, in an attempt to prevent the hatch from developing.
The idea behind her actions is that the hatch should never be developed so that the Oceanic Flight would never crash on the island. The flash-sideways scenes display what would have taken place if the plane had landed safely in Los Angeles. Being unaware of the events taken place in the past five seasons, the characters in the drama can be seen being friendly with each other in Los Angeles. I remember people playing the guitar and singing. It could have been Terry. I always took the guitar to the set there because you could always go off to the side, and Naveen [Andrews, who played Sayid] always liked to play it.
It brought back so many memories. Just that camaraderie of sun-burnt, mosquito-bitten friends on the beach just singing and chilling out and really trying to embrace how lucky we were to be able to film in such a beautiful place. This was our job, and we all felt very lucky.
Editors began to work overtime on the episode, both while production was still in progress and after it was completed, and Michael Giacchino composed and oversaw the recording of its score. Cuse: I think we had eight days in total to edit a two-hour series finale. And then the show had to march through all of the various other bits of postproduction, which were elaborate, including sound mixing, visual effects, music.
I mean everything was crazy. It was not a lot of time, and it was a two-part finale, so there was a lot to do. And they were extra-long episodes, so there was more music than normal.
Mark Goldman, editor: All the editors, as I remember, had different times where at some point we cried watching it. We had a screening of the show and Damon and I went back to my room to review that scene. We started just talking about the theme of fathers and dying and things like that. Give me like a half-hour. I turn around and I start cutting and about 30 seconds later, I suddenly burst into tears. One of the other editors was screening for network execs and at the end of it everybody, including the editor, was sitting there crying.
They were also very protective of everything in general anyway. Jossen: There were a lot of tears in the editing room that day when we all watched it for the first time together.
A lot of tears. I mean, Stephen Stemel [one of the other editors] — literally two-thirds of the way in, the most significant sound in the room was either him reaching to his Kleenex box for another Kleenex or just the sound of him sniffling.
Giacchino: What I would do is start at the beginning of the episode and work my way through it. That way I was reacting to watching it and whatever I was experiencing as I watched it, that was then put into the music. That is literally true. Glasgow: I drove home and got home in time for him to be born. He was born at home. I slept a few hours and came a couple hours late to the mix stage, but went straight back to the mix stage the next morning. It was my daughter. She was, I want to say 2 or 3.
Those are the tricks you end up doing. When the finale aired, some viewers came away thinking that , from the very beginning of the series, the survivors of Oceanic had actually been dead.
A post-credits sequence may have inadvertently contributed to that impression, but the spread of this disinformation ends now. Cuse: I only really have one regret about the whole journey of Lost and that was at the very, very end. Is there any way to soften that or ameliorate that? Is there any footage that exists that we could put at the end to just kind of ease the audience out of the show and into commercials?
Cuse: The only thing that we had or we could find was, sometime during the first season, the winter was coming and all of the pieces of the airplane had to get moved off the beach because in Hawaii, in the winter, the North Shore of Oahu, the whole geography changes.
Huge waves come in and the beaches erode away. It was an environmental hazard. So before all the pieces of the Oceanic plane were moved off the beach, a unit went out and filmed them. So we put that footage at the end of the show and I think that the problem was that the audience was so accustomed on Lost to the idea that everything had meaning and purpose and intentionality.
So they read into that footage at the end that, you know, they were dead. That was not the intention. The intention was just to create a narrative pause. But it was too portentous. It took on another meaning. And that meaning I think, distorted our intentions and helped create that misperception.
Garcia: I thought that was a nice bit to decompress at the end of it. Then I found out the next day how people started interpreting it as a thing and I was like, Oh, okay. And people still say it. People still talk about it the same way. But one of the big intentions of the show was intentional ambiguity and giving people the opportunity to digest and interpret Lost as they want to if they wanted to.
We could have all been dead. Or we could have been in like this purgatory thing. I always thought that, and still do kind of really think it was more that. Then they kind of sidestepped it with the parallel life at the end. But I must have watched it again later.
And then it began to fall into place for me, and I began to be able to describe what I thought it was or what it meant in a more effective way. And then I grew happier and happier with the ending over time. Also I think a lot of people had been saying that all along and they wanted to be right. You know what I mean? Jossen: There were always Easter eggs.
This is of course perspective because we were inside the making of the show and all the super-fans were inside the experience of watching it. But that idea — they were dead the whole time — it negates the whole show, it negates the whole point of the show. And many of them checked out on the show around season three.
Lapidus and Faraday are not characters who just pop in in season six; they were major characters who featured very prominently in what I would call the third act of the show. Again, this is not provable data. Bender: The thing that I loved about the finale and we were crucified for and still occasionally are is that ultimately the show Lost was not some Marvel-esque, super-sci-fi ending.
Or at least come to some conclusions yourself. I know that the dissatisfaction with the end of a show is common. Even I was dissatisfied with Game of Thrones. I thought that seemed like they kind of hurried out the door, they threw their clothes on and they were gone. Cusick: The show is not about the ending. That was the show. It was a time when there was no binge-watching, so you had to wait until next week, which is infuriating, you know? And yet so delicious.
Kimmel: The idea that people would put so much weight on what happened at the end is missing the point. The point of that show was the fun and the mystery and trying to figure out what was going on. It really was the most interactive show, I think, ever. Not since the Bible have so many scholars worked so hard to interpret what was written.
She keeps trying to watch it with me, but my wife is such a stickler with that. Garcia: I ran into Damon at an airport [last] … March? I was on my way to Atlanta to go do an episode of MacGyver. It was right when we started getting word that this apocalypse was starting.
I was talking to him and his wife and then he waved his son over, who is so grown now. He recognized me and he got real excited to come and meet me.
Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. The photos of Lindelof and Bender in front of the Walkabout, which Bender incorporated into a collage. Images courtesy of Jack Bender. The Lost crew, setting up for the sequence in the church.
The characters present in that final church scene are characters both dead and alive in island time, meaning several characters including Kate, Sawyer and Claire went on to live a full life beyond the series finale. These flashsideways scenes present a purgatory-of-sorts, where these characters come to when they eventually do die whenever that may be. Of course, it almost all ended rather differently Find a ranking of every single Lost episode here and an oral history of the finale , with contributions from co-creator Damon Lindelof and actors Evangeline Lilly, Henry Ian Cusick and Jorge Garcia.
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later?
Start your Independent Premium subscription today.
0コメント