PW: A lot of fans have wondered what the actual purpose for the flash-sideways is -- will it eventually be explained?
Michael: Yes, but they’re not going to spoon feed it to you. For me, the ending of the series required some analysis. It’s not given to you on a dish, neatly organized with a fancy bow put on the end of it. What it does have is a great soulfulness and the ending is human scale.
PW: It sounds like fans will have to do a lot of rewatching once the series finale airs.
Michael: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a possible response for some people. I have received the finale by degrees. I read the script without the secret scenes, then I read the secret scenes, then I shot the script and each time I’m thinking about "what does this mean?"
When I first read it, the ending wasn’t clear to me – but since then it’s grown more clear and I have to say, grown more satisfying the more I think about it. I expect a mixture of satisfaction and consternation amongst the viewers when it airs. But once they rewatch it, rethink about it and possibly look at the saga again, gradually they will feel like they have just read a good novel -- but you have to chew on it for a while.
www.skullknight.net/griffith/lostath.wav said:
Okay, finally, I have to ask, simply because it's been driving me nuts for a year and a half: what's going on with showing the other half of the outrigger shootout?
CC: The outrigger shootout is not something we're bending around in gyrations so we can solve it. In the grand scheme of the show, that is a fairly obscure piece of the show. It is your particular obsession...
DL: ...and you're not alone in it.
CC: You're not alone in it. And yes, it would have been great if we had had the opportunity to close the time loop. But you can't get everything done and keeping the narrative going in a straight line. This is one of those things where we made a very conscious choice to ask, "What are the big questions? And most importantly, what are the paths of these characters? Where do they lead?" And we followed those paths and tried not to trip ourselves up getting too diverted from that. We felt that that's the thing that's ultimately going to make the finale work or not work. We got to the point where we made the finale we wanted to make, that was our approach, and I think it was the only approach we could take. We sat here in my office, had breakfast every day for six years, talked about the show, and we used this gut check methodology, where if we both loved something and thought it was cool, that would go in. We applied that same methodology to the finale, and that was the only way we could do it. We came up with a finale that we thought was cool, that was emotional and one we really liked. That's the best we could do.
DL: When we wrote that scene and somebody started shooting at them, we knew exactly who was shooting at them. That is not a dangling thread that we don't know the answer to. That being said, as we started talking about paying that off this season, it felt like the episode was at the service of closing the time loop, as opposed to what the characters might actually be doing in that scenario. It never felt organic. We decided we would rather take our lumps from the people who couldn't scratch that itch than to produce an episode that was in service of putting people in an outrigger and getting shot at.
You put people in a lot of outriggers this season. It feels, frankly, like you're taunting me.
DL: We can't entirely deny that we're taunting you.
CC: Honestly, though, the logistics of getting all the participants in the outriggers in the configuration that was on the A-side of the time loop was actually really daunting.
DL: Considering half of them had been killed off
CC: It's not like we didn't want to do it. Like Damon says, it was just too much of a narrative deviation to do it.
You've said many times that when people find out who Adam and Eve are, we'll all realize just how long you've been planning the mythology. Well, I went back and watched the "House of the Rising Sun" scene, and Jack says that the clothing looks like it's 50 years old. Is he just not very good at calculating the rate of decay on fabric?
CC: Jack is not really an expert in carbon dating.
DL: He's not really a forensic anthropologist. We need to bring in Bones.
CC: Or Charlotte. She's an anthropolgist.
DL: The other theory that I would like to throw out there is that Jacob and his mother were just expert craftsmen. They made those clothes on that loom so well, it would appear that they were only 50 years old in decomposition, when in fact it's several thousand.
CC: Or perhaps the fabric is magic. A lot of theories there, Alan.
CowTip said:So the mother character raises these two boys to protect a mystical light on an island that supposedly contains the light of all humans (I assume light means literally their life), but then she goes on to bash the humans on the island calling them selfish, power hungry and overall terrible. She doesn't think twice about murdering anyone she meets and is grateful to die by the end of the episode. So why again did she care about protecting the light again? You'd think she'd point the humans right to it just to end it all.
グリフィス said:it was so laughably vague and simplistic it wasn't much more than a metaphor itself [...] it's pretty clear there's nothing behind the curtain, which I expected, but now it looks they're not even trying to make something up [...] It felt downright surreal halfway through the episode, like, THIS is what they're going with, really? Is this Lost, or a lost hour of the Merlin miniseries?
Deci said:Yep, from what I've gathered most LOST fans consider this episode an "acceptable" explanation. I was a little surprised, I thought they would've been really angry that the solved mystery wasn't more intriguing... but at this point I guess "acceptable" is all they're asking for.
CowTip said:"For me, the ending of the series required some analysis. It’s not given to you on a dish, neatly organized with a fancy bow put on the end of it. What it does have is a great soulfulness and the ending is human scale."
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"CC: Or perhaps the fabric is magic. A lot of theories there, Alan."
Th3Branded0ne said:how come it took too long for Hugo to get the others to meet Jacob, it was bright and sunny and they arrived when it was dark already.
Th3Branded0ne said:And Nothing really detailed was explained by Jacob other than he made a mistake and that they had to fix it.
CowTip said:Walter speaks the truth. I honestly expected things to go down the opposite way... Lost to be awesome, 24 to just quietly die, but the second half of this season's 24 has been amazing. Last night was great! Can't wait to see how it ends.
As for Lost... At least the pain is almost over~
Rhombaad said:Fringe is a show I really need to start watching. Do you need to watch from the very beginning, or can I just start now?
Aazealh said:You definitely can't start now. Some episodes are absolutely unnecessary, especially from season one, but I couldn't tell you which from memory, and they're in the midst of episodes you can't do without, so my recommendation is to just watch everything.
Oh, it's over? Haha, I totally forgot it was ending tonight. Oh well!CowTip said:Well. They took us all for a ride.
That was... awful. Man. I feel like I just got punched in the gut, and I saw this coming.
Just... terrible.
No it's not, it's on ABC, a major television network available everywhere with a digital antennae.Deci said:To play devil's advocate, it is a cable television show,
Walter said:No it's not, it's on ABC, a major television network available everywhere with a digital antennae.
Deci said:I don't see why this matters at all, but ABC is a major cable television network isn't it?
Deci said:The point was, and I assume most people would understand, is it shouldn't be help up against shows that come on premium channels. It's on the same level of other cable television shows such as... oh I dunno... CSI or something.