Lost Producers Shed Some Light On The Show's Ending

On March 16, at this year's PaleyFest in Hollywood, the Lost 10th Anniversary Reunion was held.  Josh Holloway, Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim, Jorge Garcia, Emilie de Ravin, Ian Somerhalder, Maggie Grace, Nestor Carbonell, Henry Ian Cusick, and Malcolm David Kelley were all in attendance, as well as producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. The event provided an opportunity for Cuse and Lindelof to finally shed some light on the Lost's ending, which, for many, brought up at least as many questions as it answered. Here's the answers they provided at the celebration (via RadioTimes). Were the characters on Lost dead the whole time? "No, no, no. They were not dead the whole time," Cuse said. If they weren't dead, then what were those images of an empty plane crash at the end of the finale all about? "At the end of the series finale, ABC thought it would be good to have a buffer between when you have the end of the show and when they cut to say, a Clorox commercial," Cuse explained. "We didn't have a lot of extra footage lying around, but we had footage of the plane wreckage on the beach. We thought, let's put those shots at the end of the show and it will be a little buffer and lull. And when people saw the footage of the plane with no survivors, it exacerbated the problem." Were the characters in a kind of purgatory throughout the show? "There was a very early perception that the island was purgatory and we were always out there saying 'It's not purgatory, this is real, we're not going to Sixth Sense you,'" Lindelof said. What does the finale mean then? Well, the characters were definitely dead when they finally met up in that church. "Very early on we had decided that even though Lost is a show about people on the island," said Cuse, "really, metaphorically, it was about people who were lost and searching for meaning and purpose in their lives. And because of that, we felt the ending really had to be spiritual, and one that talks about destiny. We would have long discourses about the nature of the show, for many years, and we decided it needed to mean something to us and our belief system and the characters and how all of us are here to lift each other up in our lives." What about the polar bears? Cuse gave a kind of non-answer to that one, saying "We felt like Lost was sort of the Big Bang Theory and every question would only beget another question. But what we cared about most was the emotional journey of each character." Well, there you have it. The characters in Lost were not dead to begin with, but they were certainly dead by the end. The island was not purgatory, and those images of an empty plane crash at the end were totally meaningless. I'm not sure if that makes Lost's ending better or worse.