Lost: Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse

You’d be forgiven for having lost the plot of Lost. The US drama about a group of plane crash survivors on a mysterious island drew widespread acclaim and hit ratings in 2004 when it debuted on the ABC network in the States and Channel 4 in the UK.

Five seasons in, loyal viewers need to wrap their heads around time travel, teleportation, ancient mythology and a smoke monster. Even avid fans have to scratch their heads as one question is answered and several more are posed.

Therefore, it is something of a relief that executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are preparing to pull back the curtain, reveal all and bring the series to a close at the end of the sixth run in 2010.

“Season six will be the alien war,” jokes Cuse. “I wouldn’t take that literally,” chips in Lindelof, who co-created the show with JJ Abrams. “First you need to establish the difference between a war and a skirmish.”

The master plan

The duo, who have worked together on the show since season one, have become renowned for their Fort Knox-like ability to keep secrets locked away, and a propensity to tease audiences.

It has led to accusations that they were making it up as they went along. But now, with the end in sight, Lindelof reveals there was a master plan from the beginning - even if they had to stall a little along the way.

“When people first saw the pilot there was an overwhelming issue,” he recalls. “They wanted to know if the idea [of a group of people marooned on a desert island] could sustain itself. The truth is that it couldn’t.

“A show about doctors in a hospital, lawyers in a law firm or cops in a precinct can go on and on. Lost was always going to have a beginning, middle and end.”

This plan had to be modified when the show proved a hit. “The pilot had massive ratings, the sort of thing you dream about as a writer,” says Cuse. “But when we saw the figures, Damon was in tears asking: ‘Does this mean we have to keep fucking doing this?’”

According to Lindelof, the beginning was the crash, the middle involved some of the survivors making it back to civilisation but having to return, and the end is what happens when they’re all back together.

“We were unable to do anything but ‘middle’ for seasons two and three,” he admits. “Eventually the show began to prophesise its own demise because our audience began to say we were stalling - enough with the flashbacks: do we really need to see Jack flying a kite and getting his tattoos? They didn’t realise that we had another gear that we were just waiting to get into.”

The crew, including Lindelof and Cuse, embarked on a major lobbying campaign to secure an end date, virtually unheard of in US television where shows keep running until ratings dictate their cancellation. The campaign even had a high-profile backer. “It was great to have Stephen King lobbying both privately and publicly to end the show,” says Cuse.

End in sight

They both point to The X Files as a cautionary tale. “The show was one of our favourites and if it had lasted five years, which was [creator] Chris Carter’s original plan, the legacy would have been much stronger,” says Cuse.

“But it ran four more years and became a shell of its former self. In the third series of Lost, some of our characters were locked in cages and metaphorically that is how we felt. But then the network negotiated an end date, we began to accelerate the mythology in the show and it has benefited enormously.”

Cuse hypothesises that they would have quit if their campaign had been unsuccessful. “We wouldn’t still be making the show if we didn’t have an end date,” he states. “It would have been impossible for us to continue this story without any sense of destination.”

Even with a final deadline secured, the pair had fears over how the penultimate season would be received. Lindelof says: “In this partnership, I’m the neurotic, insecure, self-defeatist and Carlton is more optimistic. But we both agreed the ‘time travel’ season would be highly problematic.”

Cuse states: “We embraced the fact that it was going to suck. But we made it interesting for ourselves and people have responded really well to that.”

With the end in sight, there were also concerns the high production values that have been sustained for more than 100 episodes might take a hit as a result of the economic downturn. “No one is immune to the global realities that we all face,” says Lindelof.

“We have had conversations about
keeping the quality bar high and what sacrifices we need to make as producers. But we can pretty much guarantee that the show you’ve been watching is going to continue to look the same for the final season.”

Neither will reveal their plans beyond Lost’s final airing in mid-2010. After co-producing hit summer movie Star Trek with JJ Abrams, Lindelof is working on the story for a sequel and is rumoured to be in line to co-write and produce a film adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series with Abrams. Cuse, meanwhile, foresees his next project to be anything but “a complex, mythology-based project.”

What they can both promise are answers to the mysteries and no loose ends in a shallow effort to keep the franchise alive. “We spent so much time lobbying for an end to the show that to leave open ends for something like a movie franchise would be a cop-out. The story will be concluded.”

Broadcast looks for reassurance that it won’t end in the same way as the latest Indiana Jones movie, which saw a giant flying saucer emerge from beneath the ground and blast off into space. The suggestion generates an uncharacteristic silence.

Lindelof responds: “Is that the same as if the whole island is a massive flying saucer, because that would be pretty cool, right?”

• The final season of Lost will air on Sky 1 in early 2010.