‘LOST’ Serves Up One Last Twist: There Really Never Was A Plan

You remember ABC’s LOST, right? How it began, how you got obsessed, how you followed it religiously for years even when it made zero sense? How you kept the faith that eventually all the loose ends would be tied up? How disappointed you were when that didn’t happen?

LOST fans continue to struggle with the show’s unanswered questions, though a select few pundits maintain “they’re there, you just don’t like them.”

Still, even though the series creators Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse and J.J. Abrams have continually said that they had a beginning, middle and end for the series in mind all along, it’s hard not to doubt that a little bit, given the over-complicated result.

But Lindelof proved doubters wrong in an interview with /Film in which he discussed the original LOST outline, presented to ABC before the show was picked up. There’s just one problem.

The leaked outline barely resembles the final product.

“ABC picked up the show, which never would have happened without this document,” Lindelof explained. “However, once those writers got to writing the actual series, many of these ideas got thrown away.”

Among the big ideas changed for the final product? The Monster, for starters. The writers originally wanted to start with the supernatural in the periphery and then eventually reveal that all of that stuff has a rational explanation. This includes The Monster, a central icon to the series mythology, which was originally to be the result of science experiments, or a “small part within an elaborate security system” guarding undiscovered facilities on the island.

Our mandate is to give LOST the same treatment as a Michael Crichton novel. Every time we introduce an element of the fantastic, we approach it from a real place. If we do it right, the “paranormal” will always be coupled with a logical explanation to remind the audience that this is the real world.

Yeah, the series pretty much went the opposite way on that one.

Honestly, it’s a bit of a relief for me to read all of that, because one of the big things that has always bothered me about LOST is the remarkable and unmistakable shift in tone after the first season.

All of this kind of justifies that feel for me, as if that was the point all along. The first season more or less follows the ideas laid out in this document, so maybe both were snake oil for ABC executives. Then, after showrunners got the ratings, they also got the creative license to do whatever they wanted. It’s a brilliant hypothesis.

No wait, that’s actually the truth.

“We knew very early on that we really wanted to end the show,” Cuse told Interview in a roundtable with Alan Ball, Vince Gilligan and Lindelof.

“Of course, that was a complete anathema to everyone at ABC, because that wasn’t how television was done — it was more like the Pony Express, where you ride the horse until it drops dead beneath you. So we really had to threaten to quit and walk away from the show in order to get them to take us seriously and actually engage in negotiation.”

You can read the original LOST outline here. I’m going to go feel betrayed somewhere…