 So, getting back to the ambiguity point, I think the danger there and what's frustrating for people and I think that with Lost, I think a lot of people feel this way, is that ambiguity can sometimes come off as not like, hey, here's something for discussion, but you didn't know. Sure. Or like you didn't have the answer, right? Right. And it's very frustrating to feel when you're very attached, and I think Alien is a franchise, obviously people are very attached to. Lost, obviously people are very attached to. And it's frustrating when you love something and you really care for it and you want there to be real answers. You know, especially for comic book fans and like fan boys, getting the answers is really important. Sure. And so, I think that the fine line you have to walk with being ambiguous is, was it ambiguous because the person doesn't have the answer or is it ambiguous because they want you to ask the question? Right. And I think that that's what can be frustrating. I mean, I told you I was going to ask you about this so I might as well just get into it now. Sure. I mean, I'm a person who watched Lost all the way through and thought the ending was extremely disappointing. Okay. Disappointing because it felt like, I felt like there was a promise of something much more, and not profound, maybe not more moving, certainly not more moving in my opinion, but something smarter, right? And it felt like it ended on this, in this way that was like, well, so what was the point? And so there, the ambiguity was not, I mean, there was, there's stuff that was specific and stuff that was ambiguous, but I feel like there was, it felt like, well, they didn't have the answer. Right. And this was the neatest way to wrap it up. Sure. Without having to answer any of the questions or, you know, avoiding some of the questions. Right. Do you, does that now haunt you, like that kind of sense of people being, of needing the answer and not getting it and you having to answer for it? I mean, I know you tweeted about Mass Effect, the end of Mass Effect 3. Sure. You said, I wasn't involved in the ending of this. Right, right. Because people have been disappointed with some of its ambiguity and- Sure. Does that feel like it's haunting you? And does it haunt you with this? I think haunt is probably not as accurate a word as, I think haunt sort of implies like something that creates a tremendous amount of stress and sadness and fear for me as much as it is something that I accept as a part of the legacy of that show. And do I embrace it? I embrace it in the same way that Matt Damon embraces Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, like under duress and wanting to punch it too. So it is a deeply conflicted ongoing battle that I have, but as obnoxious and entitled as the sounds, I also have no regrets about it. So in order to be haunted by it, I think regret is part of haunting where it's sort of like, if I could go back in time, I would do it differently. And for me, I just sort of feel that, and again, my own authorship in Lost, I have to say there were a bunch of other writers on the show. There was JJ at its inception, there was Carlton all the way through, there were amazingly talented writers in the writers room. But I take responsibility and authorship for Lost in terms of my own feelings about the ending and I make no apologies for it. I do feel like that was the ending that I wanted to do and I was always comfortable with the ambiguity of the show. And I think that there were times, if there was one regret that I had, there were times over the course of the show where in interviews I said, the answers are coming. But I challenge you to look at any interview that I gave post the middle of season three, which was the turning point, when they said, we can now give you an end date to the show. Because up until then, there was a degree of improvisation that had to occur because we didn't know how many of these things we were going to do or how long we were going to be around to be doing them. Once we said, there's going to be 48 episodes left, at that point a firm plan had to come into motion. Then from that point on, I think that I started saying publicly, if you are watching the show for the answers to your mysteries, you're not going to like the ending. And I will pull at least 10 instances of Carlton and I saying this in interviews and major publications and on television. And I'll say, hey, if you didn't do your due diligence and listen to what we had to say, you were warned. And it's not that I didn't care about the mythology of the show. I just feel like many shows have come and gone that are very focused on their mysteries and their mythologies and their ambiguity. And there is no worse scene in the history of genre than the architect explaining to Neo everything that happened in the Matrix. And I wasn't going to fucking touch that with a 10-foot pole. That is a particularly awful instance of over-explanation of feeling like you owe it to the audience. Right. Okay, so we have the architect and then we have Lost. And the Lost is not enough and the architect is too much. And somewhere in between is just right. And I'm going to always be closer to Lost than I am to the architect because that is just not interesting to me. And I think my own storytelling, the things that capture my imagination and make me want to reengage are sometimes frustrating and challenging. But for Lost, it was like, by the way, I will actually answer any questions that you have about the show. But I won't say, oh, here's what it was. I will actually refer you. I'll give you the required reading if you're worried about what the numbers were all about or what was Walt's purpose or... Those aren't the things that actually bother me. I was sitting here, I've just been sitting here listening to you talk about it and I realized I wasn't disappointed with Lost not giving me answers at the end. I was actually disappointed with the answer it gave, which it felt like the answer was all of the things that just happened didn't really mean anything. They kind of didn't happen. That was my takeaway from it. What do you mean they didn't happen? It was like all of the things that happened, all of these things that were set up as you've got to stop the man in black because X, Y, and Z. It didn't matter. Right. Well, because it wasn't real. Yes, it was. Well, but not really. It was like a shared fantasy. It didn't seem like there was... So the things that were going on on the island were happening in the actual world? Yes. I cannot believe we're talking about this, by the way, because I had no plans to get into a detailed conversation about it. So they were happening in our timeline. Correct. I mean, yes. I mean, there's no oceanic airlines in our timeline. No, no, no. But in the real world, not in this kind of like moment before death fantasy world where everybody's trying to find each other so they can go to heaven. No, correct. So at the end of the show, the last frame of the show, Matthew Fox closes his eyes and dies. That happened in our context of happening. That happened. That's all real. Then from the moment that he closed his eye, all that other stuff that we did in the sixth season of the show, the flash sideways where nobody knows each other and the plane never crashed, that is whatever your interpretation is. I'm not going to talk about what our intention is, but that's what you would define as not having happened or happening, but everything that we ever showed you, anything that takes place on the island and lost happened, absolutely 100%. The plane crashed. Those people survived. Everything that you saw throughout those six seasons, somehow- The whole struggle between good and bad, that's a really meaningful thing that actually occurred that would have threatened the universe had it not been- The Dharma Initiative is real. The island is real. All those Hurley right now, at this moment in time, Hurley and Ben, and with some help from Walt, are actually running things on the island, maintaining it, per the ending of the show. You had to think about this for the movie that could have potentially happened. No. I mean, well, look, again, I don't want to ruin the mystery and ambiguity of the show in terms of talking about our intention, but I do feel like one of the things that we always wanted to do and were very passionate about doing was exploring the idea of purgatory, both figuratively and literally. This was so obvious to the audience that within three or four episodes of the first season of the show, they were like, it's purgatory, right? They're all dead. We kept saying, we swear to God, they are not all dead. This is really happening. The audience is telling us that they really want some sort of clinical evaluation of an afterlife. Purgatory is about judgment, and this show has never really offered up what I would call Christian Judeo judgment in terms of there's a deity. It's always about self-judgment. So the idea of like, does Jack think that he's worthy, or can Sawyer forgive himself for his sins, or did Kate kill her stepfather justifiably? I always felt like if the characters can forgive themselves, then the show's over. Show's called Lost. It's not because they're on an island, it's because they're lost. So how are we going to creatively demonstrate that self-forgiveness? We're going to do this idea. And so there was an interpretation. I think largely, a large part of it came from ABC's decision to run footage of the plane wreckage over the end credits of the finale. And we publicly got out and said, oh my God, that was not our idea. That was kind of like, well, it did almost erase a lot of it. I think that was the feeling. But we also anticipated your reaction in terms of, and here's the thing is, I can't logic anyone who was disappointed in the finale into suddenly being undisappointed with it. You have a visceral reaction to things. You either like them or you don't like them. And I honor your feedback and the feedback of other dissenters. That is to say, though, that I think that in the final scene of the show that precedes the church where basically Jack's father, Christian Shepherd, says some things to Jack, one of the things that Jack says is like, wait a minute, hold on. Is this real? Did any of this happen? Because Josh is going to be busting Damon's balls about this. And Damon's going to need to say something. We edited that part out because it would have been weird for you. You would have been like, oh my god, this is strange. But then his father says, it's all real. It all happened. Everything happened. And so I was like, that's going to make it pretty clear. But it wasn't clear enough. I have to say, when did the show end? How many years ago was it? Two years. Two years ago, which seems like a long time. Exactly. It ended May 23 of 2009. 2010, sorry. I mean, I am distant from it now. But I just remember that I had that feeling of going, well, nothing matters. That's interesting. Now I want to go back and watch it, having heard this from you. Now that I've got you on the couch, though, because I've actually got you on the couch, but that's fine. I find this refreshing because I am actually really interested in, few people will engage me on their level of disappointment because it's an uncomfortable thing to do. Well, it's like telling somebody their work sucks. Yeah, but I like it. And what I would say to you is, coming into the finale, the night that the finale is going to air, before you even sit down to watch it, can you honestly tell me that you felt optimistic that at the end of those two and a half hours you would be satisfied? Or were you already like this? No, I think that something could have happened where I would have been really satisfied. Up until that point in the show, you were like, I love this. I think if you guys had been- Your faith had not wavered prior to that. No, no, no. My faith had wavered plenty. There were whole seasons that I was like, this is, why am I wasting my time watching this show because it was just very disappointing. I have a question. And I actually want to ask about that because I feel like, to me, Lost felt like a show that was meant to be fewer seasons than it actually was. And you even said there was some filler there. Oh my God, sure. I mean, to me it felt like, and this actually gets to, so let me, before I get into this question, and we will talk about Prometheus at some point. I was, look, if you guys had revealed that the entire thing was some, they were in space and it was part of an alien experiment that had been going on with thousands of other groups of humans that they'd been plucking off the planet. I was riffing, by the way. I just, I would have been like, okay, this is some weird Philip K. Dick stuff. That's how it's going to end. It's going to be like Slaughterhouse Five. And I could get totally behind that because it was like, it would have made sense to me that a lot of things didn't make sense. And it would have also been a really upsetting ending, sort of a not a, I feel like the ending was almost like a happy ending, which to me I didn't see coming or kind of didn't want. By the way, I'm one man amongst millions and millions. I'm sure there's people, I mean, I know there are millions of people who love the ending and are very satisfied by it. But yeah, there were things that I think that going into it, I felt like if there had been, my mind wasn't set against there being a conclusion that I would have been happy with. If Bob Newhart had woken up and it had all been a dream that he was having, which I talked about for years as an in-joke with my wife, I would have been completely satisfied with that ending and would have thought it was the most brilliant thing that was ever put on television. Sure. We wouldn't be having this conversation right now. Yeah. I mean, I guess we resigned ourselves either correctly or incorrectly fairly early on to the idea that whatever mythological construct we came up with for what the ultimate ending of the show was, and I feel personally speaking, one of the most unsuccessful episodes of Lost is this one across the sea, which basically tells the origin story of Jacob and the Man in Black. And it's just kind of rife with fundamental explanation. It's as close to the architect scene as we got. And it also needed to set up like, here's where the end game of the island is going to play out. I wasn't really emotionally invested in that episode because it didn't feature any of the people that I had been told to care about in the preceding 115 episodes. It wasn't that Jacob and the Man in Black weren't interesting characters. They were. But it was sort of like, wait a minute. I thought the show was about, anytime you say to people, what's Lost about? It starts with, well, there's this plane crash. And therefore, they don't say, well, centuries and centuries ago, in fact, millennia ago. If they say that, you go, boop, I'm out. So I always just felt like the show, the ending that we were shooting for was going to be one that dealt with sort of the emotional reality of the characters and gave some fundamental explanation for what did these people get out of this plane crash. And the answer, as corny as it sounds, was the one that appealed to me the most, which is each other. That's what they got. They were all fucked up, sad individuals who were lost in their own lives and hated themselves. And somehow, they found some fundamental community amongst each other. If they hadn't met each other and spent all that time on the island, then they would never have been able to forgive themselves for their past sins and break through to some sort of level of self-awakening and forgiveness. It is new agey. It is hokey. It is new age. But it's the story that I wanted to tell. It's interesting because I feel like now the alien ending that I just talked about seems very cynical and mean-spirited in comparison to what you were talking about. You're like, I wanted to define each other and be happy. And Ryan is like, they are doomed in space to go through alien experiments. But the thing is, when you go for anything, there's going to be some fundamental polarization so that, like life on Mars, for example, the American version, I will not spoil the ending for anybody who wants to embark on it. But the concept of life on Mars is that basically a detective, played by Jason Omar in the American version, basically he is, without explanation, suddenly finds himself in the 70s as a cop. And so the series is asking, he gets in a car crash. And then he wakes up in the 70s as a cop. And so the series starts to ask the question of, well, how is this possible? And they did 13 episodes. The show was canceled. But they did resolve the ending of the show. Well, there was a resolution. There was an explanation for how that happened. And I would say that it is very much in the wheelhouse of what your solution was. And there were some people who said that that was great and clever. And there were a lot of people who said that they didn't like it. And if there is a perfect ending out there for a long-form sort of mythology series, the new heart ending doesn't apply because it was a sitcom. They just did a very clever last scene for the entire series. Well, that's extreme. That one is really like, there are no more questions. Right. But it's almost like saying elsewhere, like they did the crazy snow globe ending, but it was just a hospital show. It didn't even require that. But if I said to you, let me ask you something. Do you like the X-Files? Are you asking me that right now? Yeah, I'm asking you. I love the X-Files. I love it. What happened at the end of the X-Files in the last episode? And just anything that happened? So at least you remember- In the very last episode? Yeah. I'm trying to think. It's been years. I don't remember. Right. So at least you remember. I remember the universe. I kind of remember the resolution, like what happened to the warring alien, spoiler alert to whoever's watching. It's been long enough. Screw you. You should have seen it. Yes. I remember what happens to the Smoky Man. Oh. Is he? Now I feel like I am going to spoil it for people, but I kind of remember what happens. But you have a question here. What is your question? It wasn't a question. It was at least you remember being really disappointed in the way Lost ended, and you have very specific memories of why you were disappointed. Well, it's more recent too. Right. But it's- Well, it had an ending that was very clear. Yeah. I will say that. It wasn't an ending that I particularly liked. Yes. But it had an ending. It had an ending. Yes. It definitely ended. And something you could say specifically happened to the characters. Right. I feel like at the very least, no matter what your interpretation is, you do know that everyone that you ever cared about died, and that you got treated to some version of an epilogue. How it is they died and how that all fits together, discuss amongst yourselves. I feel like we were pretty clear in it. But one of the things that I didn't want people to do is like, well, when's the movie coming out? Right. Sort of like when the Sopranos ended, and people were like, I hope there's a Sopranos movie. I'm like, if they do a movie, it completely nullifies the brilliance of the cut to black. Yeah. And there were people who didn't like the cut to black because they felt like they wanted more resolution or that there was a promise of more resolution. And at the end of the day, they didn't even understand that a movie would completely and totally erase the boldness of that decision. It's just like, that's it. That's the last time you ever will see Tony Soprano is eating onion rings in that diner with his family. That's all you get. I also imagine that ends, by the way, that's an alien experiment. Yes. On some spaceship. And guess what? No one can prove you wrong. That's right. That's why it's so brilliant. That's why it's so perfect. So actually, let's bring this back around to what you're doing. Since we're talking about alien spaceships. But creating something that goes on for six seasons or longer seems like kind of a challenge to on the creative process of telling a story. I mean, it seems like a finite, a book, I mean, you do have books like the Game of Thrones books that are obviously, they're going on and on. And that works. Yes. But it does often feel like in the creative process you want to have some, you want to know there's a finite amount that you can say. I feel like there are shows that work really well because they're like, you know, the British Office for instance. They say, we're going to do two seasons and we're done. Yep. And a Christmas special. And a Christmas special, right? Where they answer a bunch of questions, wrap ups and things. Absolutely. We finally understand. We know what happened in the office. I mean, David Brent's kit, yeah, sure. Is it more satisfying to you in some ways to work on something like Prometheus where you have, you're like, look, I've got two hours to deal with this thing. There is not going to be any filler. I've got to tell the story succinctly and answer questions in a relatively short amount of time. Is that more satisfying to you? Now you've obviously done both things. What do you get more satisfaction out of? And do you think it's actually, I mean, because I, I'm sorry, I'm going to let you answer that question, but I have a follow up to it. Yeah. I mean, it is very satisfying to do a movie that has a beginning, middle and end and you know exactly what you're getting into when you start the job. Television, you don't know what you're getting into. You don't know how many years it's going to be on for. You don't, it's hubris to say I have a plan for the entire second season of the show because no one's even watching it yet. They have to like it for you to get to that point. So they're, you know, and I talk about this often so I won't belabor the point, but the two things that sort of came up all the time during Lost were question number one, are you making it up as you go along? And the answer to that question is no. Like that's what people want you to say. No, we absolutely have a firm plan and there's a binder over there and that's where our plan is and we've got it and you're in good hands. Mommy and daddy know where we're going. Don't worry about it. You have a map. That's question number one. Question number two, how much input does the audience have? And the answer to that question is a lot. We listen to you guys all the time. We want to know what you like and what you don't like and we will adjust accordingly. Are these your actual answers? These are the answers that people want to hear. These are the answers that people want. You know, nobody wants to be told you don't matter. Like fuck the audience. Like we don't care what you have to say about the show. We're doing it the way we want to do it and nobody wants to hear we don't have a plan. We're kind of winging it and whatever feels right we're going to do. Like the truth is. Are those the real answers? They are not the real answers. The real answers I've given as politic as they may sound. The real answers are there is a plan and when the plan doesn't work we change the plan. And the other answer is yes we really listen to what you have to say. But like 98 percent of the time we agree with you before you've said it. Because the episode that you just hated we hated six months ago when we first wrote it and we started fixing already. So there's a space between the seasons where it matters a lot because we haven't started writing the next season of the show yet. But while the show is on we can see the iceberg that you are telling us to not hit but we can't turn off the ship. We can't turn off the engines in time to not hit it. We've already written those episodes. So those are the true answers. But the inherent contradiction between those two ideas of you want to listen to us but at the same time listening to us would require you to deviate from the plan that we want you to have. It feels like it's a catch 22 which is exactly what it is. But I love being in that catch 22. Like I love doing that dance and I do feel like there's a lack of safety in television that's so exciting to me and that's why I watch TV because I sort of feel like anything can happen. It can sort of go off a cliff and the more fast and loose and dangerous you play the more exciting it is to watch. And sometimes that means creatively and I sort of embrace that idea.
 So, getting back to the ambiguity point, I think the danger there and what's frustrating
 for people and I think that with Lost, I think a lot of people feel this way, is that ambiguity
 can sometimes come off as not like, hey, here's something for discussion, but you didn't know.
 Sure.
 Or like you didn't have the answer, right?
 Right.
 And it's very frustrating to feel when you're very attached, and I think Alien is a franchise,
 obviously people are very attached to.
 Lost, obviously people are very attached to.
 And it's frustrating when you love something and you really care for it and you want there
 to be real answers.
 You know, especially for comic book fans and like fan boys, getting the answers is really
 important.
 Sure.
 And so, I think that the fine line you have to walk with being ambiguous is, was it ambiguous
 because the person doesn't have the answer or is it ambiguous because they want you to
 ask the question?
 Right.
 And I think that that's what can be frustrating.
 I mean, I told you I was going to ask you about this so I might as well just get into
 it now.
 Sure.
 I mean, I'm a person who watched Lost all the way through and thought the ending was
 extremely disappointing.
 Okay.
 Disappointing because it felt like, I felt like there was a promise of something much
 more, and not profound, maybe not more moving, certainly not more moving in my opinion, but
 something smarter, right?
 And it felt like it ended on this, in this way that was like, well, so what was the point?
 And so there, the ambiguity was not, I mean, there was, there's stuff that was specific
 and stuff that was ambiguous, but I feel like there was, it felt like, well, they didn't
 have the answer.
 Right.
 And this was the neatest way to wrap it up.
 Sure.
 Without having to answer any of the questions or, you know, avoiding some of the questions.
 Right.
 Do you, does that now haunt you, like that kind of sense of people being, of needing
 the answer and not getting it and you having to answer for it?
 I mean, I know you tweeted about Mass Effect, the end of Mass Effect 3.
 Sure.
 You said, I wasn't involved in the ending of this.
 Right, right.
 Because people have been disappointed with some of its ambiguity and-
 Sure.
 Does that feel like it's haunting you?
 And does it haunt you with this?
 I think haunt is probably not as accurate a word as, I think haunt sort of implies like
 something that creates a tremendous amount of stress and sadness and fear for me as much
 as it is something that I accept as a part of the legacy of that show.
 And do I embrace it?
 I embrace it in the same way that Matt Damon embraces Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting,
 like under duress and wanting to punch it too.
 So it is a deeply conflicted ongoing battle that I have, but as obnoxious and entitled
 as the sounds, I also have no regrets about it.
 So in order to be haunted by it, I think regret is part of haunting where it's sort of like,
 if I could go back in time, I would do it differently.
 And for me, I just sort of feel that, and again, my own authorship in Lost, I have to
 say there were a bunch of other writers on the show.
 There was JJ at its inception, there was Carlton all the way through, there were amazingly
 talented writers in the writers room.
 But I take responsibility and authorship for Lost in terms of my own feelings about the
 ending and I make no apologies for it.
 I do feel like that was the ending that I wanted to do and I was always comfortable
 with the ambiguity of the show.
 And I think that there were times, if there was one regret that I had, there were times
 over the course of the show where in interviews I said, the answers are coming.
 But I challenge you to look at any interview that I gave post the middle of season three,
 which was the turning point, when they said, we can now give you an end date to the show.
 Because up until then, there was a degree of improvisation that had to occur because
 we didn't know how many of these things we were going to do or how long we were going
 to be around to be doing them.
 Once we said, there's going to be 48 episodes left, at that point a firm plan had to come
 into motion.
 Then from that point on, I think that I started saying publicly, if you are watching the show
 for the answers to your mysteries, you're not going to like the ending.
 And I will pull at least 10 instances of Carlton and I saying this in interviews and major
 publications and on television.
 And I'll say, hey, if you didn't do your due diligence and listen to what we had to say,
 you were warned.
 And it's not that I didn't care about the mythology of the show.
 I just feel like many shows have come and gone that are very focused on their mysteries
 and their mythologies and their ambiguity.
 And there is no worse scene in the history of genre than the architect explaining to
 Neo everything that happened in the Matrix.
 And I wasn't going to fucking touch that with a 10-foot pole.
 That is a particularly awful instance of over-explanation of feeling like you owe it to the audience.
 Right.
 Okay, so we have the architect and then we have Lost.
 And the Lost is not enough and the architect is too much.
 And somewhere in between is just right.
 And I'm going to always be closer to Lost than I am to the architect because that is
 just not interesting to me.
 And I think my own storytelling, the things that capture my imagination and make me want
 to reengage are sometimes frustrating and challenging.
 But for Lost, it was like, by the way, I will actually answer any questions that you have
 about the show.
 But I won't say, oh, here's what it was.
 I will actually refer you.
 I'll give you the required reading if you're worried about what the numbers were all about
 or what was Walt's purpose or...
 Those aren't the things that actually bother me.
 I was sitting here, I've just been sitting here listening to you talk about it and I
 realized I wasn't disappointed with Lost not giving me answers at the end.
 I was actually disappointed with the answer it gave, which it felt like the answer was
 all of the things that just happened didn't really mean anything.
 They kind of didn't happen.
 That was my takeaway from it.
 What do you mean they didn't happen?
 It was like all of the things that happened, all of these things that were set up as you've
 got to stop the man in black because X, Y, and Z.
 It didn't matter.
 Right.
 Well, because it wasn't real.
 Yes, it was.
 Well, but not really.
 It was like a shared fantasy.
 It didn't seem like there was...
 So the things that were going on on the island were happening in the actual world?
 Yes.
 I cannot believe we're talking about this, by the way, because I had no plans to get
 into a detailed conversation about it.
 So they were happening in our timeline.
 Correct.
 I mean, yes.
 I mean, there's no oceanic airlines in our timeline.
 No, no, no.
 But in the real world, not in this kind of like moment before death fantasy world where
 everybody's trying to find each other so they can go to heaven.
 No, correct.
 So at the end of the show, the last frame of the show, Matthew Fox closes his eyes and
 dies.
 That happened in our context of happening.
 That happened.
 That's all real.
 Then from the moment that he closed his eye, all that other stuff that we did in the sixth
 season of the show, the flash sideways where nobody knows each other and the plane never
 crashed, that is whatever your interpretation is.
 I'm not going to talk about what our intention is, but that's what you would define as not
 having happened or happening, but everything that we ever showed you, anything that takes
 place on the island and lost happened, absolutely 100%.
 The plane crashed.
 Those people survived.
 Everything that you saw throughout those six seasons, somehow-
 The whole struggle between good and bad, that's a really meaningful thing that actually occurred
 that would have threatened the universe had it not been-
 The Dharma Initiative is real.
 The island is real.
 All those Hurley right now, at this moment in time, Hurley and Ben, and with some help
 from Walt, are actually running things on the island, maintaining it, per the ending
 of the show.
 You had to think about this for the movie that could have potentially happened.
 No.
 I mean, well, look, again, I don't want to ruin the mystery and ambiguity of the show
 in terms of talking about our intention, but I do feel like one of the things that we always
 wanted to do and were very passionate about doing was exploring the idea of purgatory,
 both figuratively and literally.
 This was so obvious to the audience that within three or four episodes of the first season
 of the show, they were like, it's purgatory, right?
 They're all dead.
 We kept saying, we swear to God, they are not all dead.
 This is really happening.
 The audience is telling us that they really want some sort of clinical evaluation of an
 afterlife.
 Purgatory is about judgment, and this show has never really offered up what I would call
 Christian Judeo judgment in terms of there's a deity.
 It's always about self-judgment.
 So the idea of like, does Jack think that he's worthy, or can Sawyer forgive himself
 for his sins, or did Kate kill her stepfather justifiably?
 I always felt like if the characters can forgive themselves, then the show's over.
 Show's called Lost.
 It's not because they're on an island, it's because they're lost.
 So how are we going to creatively demonstrate that self-forgiveness?
 We're going to do this idea.
 And so there was an interpretation.
 I think largely, a large part of it came from ABC's decision to run footage of the plane
 wreckage over the end credits of the finale.
 And we publicly got out and said, oh my God, that was not our idea.
 That was kind of like, well, it did almost erase a lot of it.
 I think that was the feeling.
 But we also anticipated your reaction in terms of, and here's the thing is, I can't logic
 anyone who was disappointed in the finale into suddenly being undisappointed with it.
 You have a visceral reaction to things.
 You either like them or you don't like them.
 And I honor your feedback and the feedback of other dissenters.
 That is to say, though, that I think that in the final scene of the show that precedes
 the church where basically Jack's father, Christian Shepherd, says some things to Jack,
 one of the things that Jack says is like, wait a minute, hold on.
 Is this real?
 Did any of this happen?
 Because Josh is going to be busting Damon's balls about this.
 And Damon's going to need to say something.
 We edited that part out because it would have been weird for you.
 You would have been like, oh my god, this is strange.
 But then his father says, it's all real.
 It all happened.
 Everything happened.
 And so I was like, that's going to make it pretty clear.
 But it wasn't clear enough.
 I have to say, when did the show end?
 How many years ago was it?
 Two years.
 Two years ago, which seems like a long time.
 Exactly.
 It ended May 23 of 2009.
 2010, sorry.
 I mean, I am distant from it now.
 But I just remember that I had that feeling of going, well, nothing matters.
 That's interesting.
 Now I want to go back and watch it, having heard this from you.
 Now that I've got you on the couch, though, because I've actually got you on the couch,
 but that's fine.
 I find this refreshing because I am actually really interested in, few people will engage
 me on their level of disappointment because it's an uncomfortable thing to do.
 Well, it's like telling somebody their work sucks.
 Yeah, but I like it.
 And what I would say to you is, coming into the finale, the night that the finale is going
 to air, before you even sit down to watch it, can you honestly tell me that you felt
 optimistic that at the end of those two and a half hours you would be satisfied?
 Or were you already like this?
 No, I think that something could have happened where I would have been really satisfied.
 Up until that point in the show, you were like, I love this.
 I think if you guys had been-
 Your faith had not wavered prior to that.
 No, no, no.
 My faith had wavered plenty.
 There were whole seasons that I was like, this is, why am I wasting my time watching
 this show because it was just very disappointing.
 I have a question.
 And I actually want to ask about that because I feel like, to me, Lost felt like a show
 that was meant to be fewer seasons than it actually was.
 And you even said there was some filler there.
 Oh my God, sure.
 I mean, to me it felt like, and this actually gets to, so let me, before I get into this
 question, and we will talk about Prometheus at some point.
 I was, look, if you guys had revealed that the entire thing was some, they were in space
 and it was part of an alien experiment that had been going on with thousands of other
 groups of humans that they'd been plucking off the planet.
 I was riffing, by the way.
 I just, I would have been like, okay, this is some weird Philip K. Dick stuff.
 That's how it's going to end.
 It's going to be like Slaughterhouse Five.
 And I could get totally behind that because it was like, it would have made sense to me
 that a lot of things didn't make sense.
 And it would have also been a really upsetting ending, sort of a not a, I feel like the ending
 was almost like a happy ending, which to me I didn't see coming or kind of didn't want.
 By the way, I'm one man amongst millions and millions.
 I'm sure there's people, I mean, I know there are millions of people who love the ending
 and are very satisfied by it.
 But yeah, there were things that I think that going into it, I felt like if there had been,
 my mind wasn't set against there being a conclusion that I would have been happy with.
 If Bob Newhart had woken up and it had all been a dream that he was having, which I talked
 about for years as an in-joke with my wife, I would have been completely satisfied with
 that ending and would have thought it was the most brilliant thing that was ever put
 on television.
 Sure.
 We wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I guess we resigned ourselves either correctly or incorrectly fairly early on to
 the idea that whatever mythological construct we came up with for what the ultimate ending
 of the show was, and I feel personally speaking, one of the most unsuccessful episodes of Lost
 is this one across the sea, which basically tells the origin story of Jacob and the Man
 in Black.
 And it's just kind of rife with fundamental explanation.
 It's as close to the architect scene as we got.
 And it also needed to set up like, here's where the end game of the island is going
 to play out.
 I wasn't really emotionally invested in that episode because it didn't feature any of the
 people that I had been told to care about in the preceding 115 episodes.
 It wasn't that Jacob and the Man in Black weren't interesting characters.
 They were.
 But it was sort of like, wait a minute.
 I thought the show was about, anytime you say to people, what's Lost about?
 It starts with, well, there's this plane crash.
 And therefore, they don't say, well, centuries and centuries ago, in fact, millennia ago.
 If they say that, you go, boop, I'm out.
 So I always just felt like the show, the ending that we were shooting for was going to be
 one that dealt with sort of the emotional reality of the characters and gave some fundamental
 explanation for what did these people get out of this plane crash.
 And the answer, as corny as it sounds, was the one that appealed to me the most, which
 is each other.
 That's what they got.
 They were all fucked up, sad individuals who were lost in their own lives and hated themselves.
 And somehow, they found some fundamental community amongst each other.
 If they hadn't met each other and spent all that time on the island, then they would never
 have been able to forgive themselves for their past sins and break through to some sort of
 level of self-awakening and forgiveness.
 It is new agey.
 It is hokey.
 It is new age.
 But it's the story that I wanted to tell.
 It's interesting because I feel like now the alien ending that I just talked about seems
 very cynical and mean-spirited in comparison to what you were talking about.
 You're like, I wanted to define each other and be happy.
 And Ryan is like, they are doomed in space to go through alien experiments.
 But the thing is, when you go for anything, there's going to be some fundamental polarization
 so that, like life on Mars, for example, the American version, I will not spoil the ending
 for anybody who wants to embark on it.
 But the concept of life on Mars is that basically a detective, played by Jason Omar in the American
 version, basically he is, without explanation, suddenly finds himself in the 70s as a cop.
 And so the series is asking, he gets in a car crash.
 And then he wakes up in the 70s as a cop.
 And so the series starts to ask the question of, well, how is this possible?
 And they did 13 episodes.
 The show was canceled.
 But they did resolve the ending of the show.
 Well, there was a resolution.
 There was an explanation for how that happened.
 And I would say that it is very much in the wheelhouse of what your solution was.
 And there were some people who said that that was great and clever.
 And there were a lot of people who said that they didn't like it.
 And if there is a perfect ending out there for a long-form sort of mythology series,
 the new heart ending doesn't apply because it was a sitcom.
 They just did a very clever last scene for the entire series.
 Well, that's extreme.
 That one is really like, there are no more questions.
 Right.
 But it's almost like saying elsewhere, like they did the crazy snow globe ending, but
 it was just a hospital show.
 It didn't even require that.
 But if I said to you, let me ask you something.
 Do you like the X-Files?
 Are you asking me that right now?
 Yeah, I'm asking you.
 I love the X-Files.
 I love it.
 What happened at the end of the X-Files in the last episode?
 And just anything that happened?
 So at least you remember-
 In the very last episode?
 Yeah.
 I'm trying to think.
 It's been years.
 I don't remember.
 Right.
 So at least you remember.
 I remember the universe.
 I kind of remember the resolution, like what happened to the warring alien, spoiler alert
 to whoever's watching.
 It's been long enough.
 Screw you.
 You should have seen it.
 Yes.
 I remember what happens to the Smoky Man.
 Oh.
 Is he?
 Now I feel like I am going to spoil it for people, but I kind of remember what happens.
 But you have a question here.
 What is your question?
 It wasn't a question.
 It was at least you remember being really disappointed in the way Lost ended, and you
 have very specific memories of why you were disappointed.
 Well, it's more recent too.
 Right.
 But it's-
 Well, it had an ending that was very clear.
 Yeah.
 I will say that.
 It wasn't an ending that I particularly liked.
 Yes.
 But it had an ending.
 It had an ending.
 Yes.
 It definitely ended.
 And something you could say specifically happened to the characters.
 Right.
 I feel like at the very least, no matter what your interpretation is, you do know that everyone
 that you ever cared about died, and that you got treated to some version of an epilogue.
 How it is they died and how that all fits together, discuss amongst yourselves.
 I feel like we were pretty clear in it.
 But one of the things that I didn't want people to do is like, well, when's the movie coming
 out?
 Right.
 Sort of like when the Sopranos ended, and people were like, I hope there's a Sopranos
 movie.
 I'm like, if they do a movie, it completely nullifies the brilliance of the cut to black.
 Yeah.
 And there were people who didn't like the cut to black because they felt like they wanted
 more resolution or that there was a promise of more resolution.
 And at the end of the day, they didn't even understand that a movie would completely and
 totally erase the boldness of that decision.
 It's just like, that's it.
 That's the last time you ever will see Tony Soprano is eating onion rings in that diner
 with his family.
 That's all you get.
 I also imagine that ends, by the way, that's an alien experiment.
 Yes.
 On some spaceship.
 And guess what?
 No one can prove you wrong.
 That's right.
 That's why it's so brilliant.
 That's why it's so perfect.
 So actually, let's bring this back around to what you're doing.
 Since we're talking about alien spaceships.
 But creating something that goes on for six seasons or longer seems like kind of a challenge
 to on the creative process of telling a story.
 I mean, it seems like a finite, a book, I mean, you do have books like the Game of Thrones
 books that are obviously, they're going on and on.
 And that works.
 Yes.
 But it does often feel like in the creative process you want to have some, you want to
 know there's a finite amount that you can say.
 I feel like there are shows that work really well because they're like, you know, the British
 Office for instance.
 They say, we're going to do two seasons and we're done.
 Yep.
 And a Christmas special.
 And a Christmas special, right?
 Where they answer a bunch of questions, wrap ups and things.
 Absolutely.
 We finally understand.
 We know what happened in the office.
 I mean, David Brent's kit, yeah, sure.
 Is it more satisfying to you in some ways to work on something like Prometheus where
 you have, you're like, look, I've got two hours to deal with this thing.
 There is not going to be any filler.
 I've got to tell the story succinctly and answer questions in a relatively short amount
 of time.
 Is that more satisfying to you?
 Now you've obviously done both things.
 What do you get more satisfaction out of?
 And do you think it's actually, I mean, because I, I'm sorry, I'm going to let you answer
 that question, but I have a follow up to it.
 Yeah.
 I mean, it is very satisfying to do a movie that has a beginning, middle and end and you
 know exactly what you're getting into when you start the job.
 Television, you don't know what you're getting into.
 You don't know how many years it's going to be on for.
 You don't, it's hubris to say I have a plan for the entire second season of the show because
 no one's even watching it yet.
 They have to like it for you to get to that point.
 So they're, you know, and I talk about this often so I won't belabor the point, but the
 two things that sort of came up all the time during Lost were question number one, are
 you making it up as you go along?
 And the answer to that question is no.
 Like that's what people want you to say.
 No, we absolutely have a firm plan and there's a binder over there and that's where our plan
 is and we've got it and you're in good hands.
 Mommy and daddy know where we're going.
 Don't worry about it.
 You have a map.
 That's question number one.
 Question number two, how much input does the audience have?
 And the answer to that question is a lot.
 We listen to you guys all the time.
 We want to know what you like and what you don't like and we will adjust accordingly.
 Are these your actual answers?
 These are the answers that people want to hear.
 These are the answers that people want.
 You know, nobody wants to be told you don't matter.
 Like fuck the audience.
 Like we don't care what you have to say about the show.
 We're doing it the way we want to do it and nobody wants to hear we don't have a plan.
 We're kind of winging it and whatever feels right we're going to do.
 Like the truth is.
 Are those the real answers?
 They are not the real answers.
 The real answers I've given as politic as they may sound.
 The real answers are there is a plan and when the plan doesn't work we change the plan.
 And the other answer is yes we really listen to what you have to say.
 But like 98 percent of the time we agree with you before you've said it.
 Because the episode that you just hated we hated six months ago when we first wrote it
 and we started fixing already.
 So there's a space between the seasons where it matters a lot because we haven't started
 writing the next season of the show yet.
 But while the show is on we can see the iceberg that you are telling us to not hit but we
 can't turn off the ship.
 We can't turn off the engines in time to not hit it.
 We've already written those episodes.
 So those are the true answers.
 But the inherent contradiction between those two ideas of you want to listen to us but
 at the same time listening to us would require you to deviate from the plan that we want
 you to have.
 It feels like it's a catch 22 which is exactly what it is.
 But I love being in that catch 22.
 Like I love doing that dance and I do feel like there's a lack of safety in television
 that's so exciting to me and that's why I watch TV because I sort of feel like anything
 can happen.
 It can sort of go off a cliff and the more fast and loose and dangerous you play the
 more exciting it is to watch.
 And sometimes that means creatively and I sort of embrace that idea.