It’s all about the Others…and maybe a little making out.
Or at least that’s what Lost producers Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse and Bryan Burk would have Hollywood.com believe when we cornered them at Comic-Con and asked for any scoop they could spare on Season Three.
Hollywood.com: So tell us everything about Season Three. Lay it all out for us.
Carlton Cuse: Robots. Bad robots. Good robots, actually, versus bad robots.
Damon Lindelof: One of the things that’s really cool to us about Season Three is that we’re not going to have reruns this year, which is sort of a big frustration, both for us creatively and the fans in terms of getting traction. We feel like we’ve all arrived at a compromise that’s going to be awesome. As a result, the downside is that there is going to be thirteen weeks with no Lost. But we’re designing almost a mini-season that’s going to start the first week of October and run all the way through the middle of November with six consecutive episodes that will almost be sort of a self contained storyline, with it’s own little mini-cliffhanger. That way, when we come back in February and run the remaining sixteen episodes, it should be fairly cool. We all sat down and worked out the entire season right when we finished Season Two. We didn’t even break. All the writers went down to Hawaii, and we basically figured out what the tent poles of [Season Three] were going to be. At the end of episode six, a tremendous amount of stuff is going to be happening. I don’t know how I could possibly be any vaguer in terms of specifics.
Cuse: Season Three is going to focus a lot more on the Others. It’s going to be very different in feel from Season Two, which was really sort of playing around the Hatch. It’ll be our characters interaction with the Others. We will come to know a little bit more about who they are or what they’re society is like, what their mission is. Where they came from. Who leads and who comprises their society. So that’s very much a part of the show. A lot of action adventure and definitely more romance this year on the show.
Bryan Burk: And just a lot of romance between us.
Cuse: And a lot more romance between us. Yes.
HW: Is the intention to humanize the Others more and make us like them more or just make us understand them more?
Lindelof: Well, I think like everything on Lost, your initial expectations are often confounded on the show and so whatever you’re thinking about the Others right now, I’m pretty sure that you won’t be thinking the same thing by the end of the season.
Burk: Yeah. I think that a lot of people have the wrong assumption about who these people are and how long they’ve been on the island and just like every other character on the show, I would be very interested to see what a Henry Gale flashback looked like. Again, you introduce a character in a very sort of conflict ridden scenario where you see them at their worst, but then gradually you being to see things from their side of it. So that’s always been the plan on the show and going into Season Two, the big question was about what was in the Hatch and we feel that going in to Season Three, the big question is who are these other people on the island and why did they take Jack, Kate and Sawyer? Why do they want those three?
Lindelof: And actually a sort of Comic-Con exclusive, in Keyser Soze [from The Usual Suspects] fashion, Bryan Burk is actually the leader of the Others.
Burk: That is true.
HW: Sort of how Star Wars lost its luster, are you concerned with how popular Lost is and how bright it’s burning and trying to maintain that brightness?
Cuse: I don’t think that you can do anything about that. I think that we’ve had a really long run at the top of the sort of popular zeitgeist and I think that part is out of our control. Yes, new things will come along. I mean, clearly this year Grey’s Anatomy is burning a lot brighter in the sort of popular culture light than Lost is. I think that all we can do is try to make the show as good as we can make it. I think that we can recognize that we’re not destined to be at the forefront of popular culture with the show for an indefinite period of time.
Lindelof: We’ve done 49 hours of Lost now in just under two years. So the intensity at which the show burns fuel is much faster, as is the audience predilection to turn on it. When something is in popular culture, people like the minute it takes a misstep or makes a decision the audience doesn’t like as a whole. Then they’re quick to say that it’s jumped the shark or they’re over it. The reality is that we have to do a tap dance every week. George Lucas had fifteen years to put Episodes One, Two and Three together. I think that’s why the fans were especially disappointed because they were like, “We waited all this time for that?!’”So with us every eight days we’re generating a new episode of Lost, so there is no way we can avoid the inevitable “It’s not as good as it once was.” Because it’s either not as good as it once was or it’s better, never been better. Those are the two poles.
HW: Are you still thinking about building it to a definite end? There was talk about doing movies…
Lindelof: The reality is that right now we have the benefit of staying in line according to the original plan. The metaphor that we always use is like, driving from New York to L.A. We’re perfectly on course, but there will reach a point in our storytelling where have to go, “Oh, wow. We actually have to circle back and do a couple of loops to loops or we’re going to get there too soon.” Once that happens for us creatively we’re going to disconnect from the show. We’re going to get jazzed because we don’t want to stall anymore than the audience wants us to stall. So fortunately we’ve designed at least four seasons, potentially five, before we get to that point where we are making stuff up as we go along. I think that while the audience often accuses us of that there has to be an improvisational quality to television…
Cuse: Or it wouldn’t be good. If we forced the storytelling you would actually feel worse. I mean, like Henry Gale, he was going to be in two episodes and the actor was so awesome that we ended up having him be in it longer. That was sort of the elasticity, but the plan to discover a prisoner in the hatch and have him turn out to be a significant member of the Others was always in place.
Burk: Or you can’t write chemistry. Michelle Rodriguez’s character arc, from the word go, was always going to end in Season Two, but we were talking about her as being a love interest for Matthew Fox’s character. But in their scenes together, those sparks never really materialized, so we just sort of had them be Army buddies. But we sort of cut bait on that storyline because you can’t write chemistry.
Cuse:: If we had said, since that was our plan, we are going to force that chemistry, then people would’ve thought, “That’s cheesy. I don’t buy it.” So you have to sort of listen to the show and do what it tells you to do. I mean, we have an end point to the show. The problem is that we don’t know when we’re going to get there. We work in a network television environment in which as long as the show is successful, ABC has it. It’s their job to make as much money off of the show as they can. I mean, we would love to say that after four or five seasons, the show is over. Like J. K. Rowling said: “There’s going to be seven Harry Potter books. That’s it.” Everyone takes comfort in knowing her story is arriving at a conclusion and we’re working in an open-ended environment. That’s really challenging because have a set amount of mythology, but we don’t know how long it has to play out. So I guess that all we can sort of do is to encourage people to enjoy the journey and not worry so much about the destination. That’s what we have to do, too, because if we start thinking about the destination it freaks us out. Because we don’t know where that is.
For some more insider hints about Season Three, check out Hollywood.com’s interviews with Lost’s Jorge Garcia and Daniel Dae Kim here!
